Giulia Barbareschi, PhD student at UCL, joins us to talk about her PhD research which seeks to redesign (or optimise) the wheelchair. We discuss why the wheelchair needs optimising in the first place, as well as Giulia's research which aims to reduce the physical demand on wheelchair users' arms through optimising the seat position of manual wheelchairs and designing new fuel cells for power-assisted wheelchairs. We also talk about how 3D printing and fab labs will have a huge effect on modular wheelchair optimisations. Follow UCL PAMELA(twitter.com/UCLPamela) and UCL TARSAN (https://twitter.com/UCL_TARSAN) on Twitter for more news on accessibility engineering, and find out more about the study Giulia mentioned over on the TARSAN website (http://www.cege.ucl.ac.uk/tarsan/Pages/study.aspx) Catch up on past episodes of Keep it Civil (soundcloud.com/cege_ucl/sets/keep-it-civil) Intro& outro music: "Helix Nebula" by Anamanaguchi via CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Anamanaguchi/Party_in_Space/kzz007_-_14_-_anamanaguchi_-_helix_nebula)