Keio Startup Humonii Develops Hands-Free Electric Wheelchair
The design choice is the story: Humonii built a semi-autonomous chair rather than a fully automatic one, after patients in an earlier mobility support activity said they were scared of full automation and wanted to do what they could themselves.
Reporting from 1 source: ASCII.jp.
Humonii, a startup founded from Keio University in April 2026 and selected for the Keio Startup Incubation Program, is developing Feeling, a semi-autonomous electric wheelchair that moves by reading shifts in the user's center of gravity. A belt-type interface and AI operation assistance system, based on research from the Masaki Takahashi Laboratory, allow users who cannot move their hands, including people with quadriplegia, to move independently.
Feeling does not steer with a lever. A belt-type interface reads the strength of the user's trunk and an AI operation assistance system interprets a slight shift in center of gravity as a direction of travel, so a patient with quadriplegia can move the chair on their own initiative.
CEO Yosuke Kawasaki said the concept came out of a mobility support activity with a fully automatic wheelchair, where patients said full automation left them uneasy and that they wanted to keep doing what they could themselves. Demonstration experiments have run since 2025, before the company was founded, and continued use is expected to make trunk movement smoother and improve balance and posture.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.