Since we arrived in China, we observed that no one is using crutches in the street. Weird right ? Because in Switzerland we could see someone at least three times a day…
Meeting Chinese designers from Artop we had the opportunity to discuss our product with them and got very interesting insight. None of them had ever heard of partial weight bearing. They knew about crutches but they said that people would rather stay at home and put no weight at all on their leg and wait longer to recover. In fact, Chinese people put a great attention on how they look in the street and walking with crutches would make them feel very shameful.
We also had the opportunity to visit Chinese hospitals and ask them about that. What was very interesting is that they actually do partial weight bearing. But patients are either too lazy or too scared to do it and would rather wait until they recover to walk again. The nurses could really see the potential of our product which was very encouraging for us. But, what we discovered is that in China, the our crutches which are elbow crutches are really hard to use for Chinese people because it requires a lot of strength therefor, they would rather choose under arm crutches.
In conclusion, we learned that our product has a big potential in China since it can really make a difference in here. The only thing is we should adapt our design to correspond the known model and make it look more like a fashion accessory so people would accept to appear on the street with them.