MotTy is a motorized trolley attachment that allows trolleys to be handled more easily. The goal is to reduce the physical intensity of labour intensive jobs and to ease integration of the ageing population into the workforce.

Our team is interested in leveraging on technology to provide more opportunities for the elderly who wish to contribute within the service industry. After conducting interviews and research in our target market, we found out that 20% of the existing staff in hotel industries consist of elderly people, mostly as housekeepers. The service industry undeniably involves many aspects of physical labor - where human touch is one of its focal points. By reducing the physical intensity of the workloads in the service industry, we will be able to lower the barrier of entry for less physically advantaged workers in the service sector.

A universal attachment enables the motor assembly to mount on the bottom of various trolleys. The CAD drawing shows an annotated exploded view of the motor assembly, consisting of a wheel unit, adjustable plates, remote control and detachable batteries. The vertically adjustable plates enable universality when working with trolleys of various casted wheel sizes. Each plate will be locked with four bolt and nut assemblies with a vertical bolt force-fitted between the horizontal bolts to prevent sliding of the plates. The motor controller connects wirelessly to a user interface fixed on the trolley’s handrail for convenience. The positioning of control inputs, intuitive button choices, and design choices allows for simple one-handed operation. The layout is simple with only three controls to make it simple to use for the elderly. In other words, our solution is a plug-and-play universal attachment which enables immediate usage at the push of a button.

By employing frameworks such as morphological charts and C-sketches, we set about designing our initial prototype. This allowed divergent thinking before we made any design decisions. We divided our solution into four subsystems: the Chassis, Actuation, Power, and Control. To choose what features to include, we evaluated the contesting concepts against a reference design and weighted them based on insights obtained from our interviews. The first design we settled on included lithium ion batteries and a rudimentary wired controller. We discovered that the batteries were too expensive despite the benefits over its counterparts, and the controller wires were occasionally damaged due to wear and tear. In addition, our contraption was fastened onto a metal chassis bolted to the bottom of the trolley. This system would not make our solution universal as holes needed to be custom drilled for each trolley. Therefore, we needed a more suitable power source and alternative control systems. We plan to use the cheaper and more robust lead acid batteries and radio frequency wireless remote controller. Furthermore, a novel U-shaped chassis design was introduced to leverage on the bolts of the trolley’s caster wheels for support.

In our competitor research, we have found companies that too publicize customized motorized trolleys that can help to reduce the physical burden of pushing heavily loaded trolleys. However, this requires the complete replacement of existing trolleys as well as much overhead to redesign the motorized trolleys to suit their purpose. Our interviews with hotel managers have surfaced concerns that such solutions are excessively costly as they have already invested in a large number of manual trolleys for their existing logistical network. Our solution, a universal attachment, is adaptive and can be used on existing trolleys without much configuration. Our solution is versatile and can be easily switched from one trolley to another wherever required. Our solution provides a lower cost alternative that does not render the current trolleys obsolete but rather leverages on it to create a more efficient device.