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Who invented the rollator?
The first rollator was invented in 1978 in Västerås by inventor Aina Wifalk. Roughly 60,000 rollators are prescribed in Sweden each year, making Sweden the country with the highest density of rollators in the world.
The rollator has the same frame as a walking frame, however, it has three or four large wheels attached to it. The model also has handlebars and a seat. The seat is for when the user needs rest to re-energise.
At a young age, Aina Wifalk began studying to be a nurse, but when she was only 21 she suffered from polio and had to drop her studies. Instead, she retrained as a counsellor. Sometime in the 1950s, she moved to Västerås where she became a counsellor at Västerås Hospital. At the end of the 1960s, she became what was then called a counsellor for the handicapped for the local council.
In 1976 she stopped working as a counsellor for the handicapped and received sickness benefits because her shoulders had become worn out from having walked around on walking sticks for a little over twenty years. She started thinking about gentler ways to help people who have difficulty walking on their own, and in 1978 she came up with an idea for a completely new type of aid on wheels. That same year she applied for money from a state development fund in order to get help turning the idea into a finished product. The administrators for the fund saw the potential of the project and gave Wifalk financial support as well as connected her with a company, which built the first prototype. Only three years later production had started.
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