Summary:
- Retired engineer Kelvin Chan repairs personal mobility aids (PMAs) for seniors in Singapore, often offering simple fixes for free to support those with little or no income.
- He sees his work as both a way to restore independence for elderly users and a means of reducing e-waste by extending the lifespan of PMAs.
- With mentorship from a veteran repairer, Kelvin now aims to grow the small workshop into a community repair hub to better serve seniors’ needs.
When former engineer Kelvin Chan heads out to fix faulty personal mobility aids (PMAs) for seniors, he will almost always encounter what he calls “10-second cases”.
These include users who fail to charge their batteries properly, leading to a motorised scooter or wheelchair that refuses to start, or people who simply forget to shift gears to “drive” after being wheeled around in “neutral”.
Though the diagnosis and fix are simple for the 58-year-old to handle, it isn’t the case for the seniors he’s trying to help.
So he hops into his van, making the journey from his workshop in an industrial estate in Tampines, to the homes of silvers needing his services.
It might be surprising to know, then, that Kelvin always gives away these simple repairs for free.
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Repairing personal mobility aids supports community, sustainability
To cut down costs, Kelvin attempts to group house calls by location. He’s usually able to get through five to 10 cases a day.
"If it's serious enough, we might have to wait for specialised parts – so that will take a few days."
While the silver is an engineer by training and career, his work did not deal specifically with motorised vehicles. He only started fixing PMAs after retiring from his day job.
"But I still wanted to work, just without that focus on bread-and-butter issues. I wanted something more fulfilling. Something where I would be able to help people."
He first found work in a non-profit organisation fixing manual wheelchairs. He then eventually attended a workshop conducted by Steven Tan, the 68-year-old owner of the workshop he’s now based in.
The older man is a veteran with over 20 years of experience repairing electric mobility aids, and Kelvin found the niche “especially interesting” given his engineering background.
The pair met after the event and quickly hit it off, with Steven deciding to take the younger silver under his wing.
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"Personal mobility is a human right"
Four years on, and Kelvin estimates that he can now get through around 30 PMAs in a single week.
The work is consistent and ever-flowing. Most requests come via referrals from social service organisations, though a small portion stems from word-of-mouth recommendations. Still, the silver sees it as a growing market in both supply and demand.
"Every broken PMA is a form of e-waste, but if you can get it to work for three, four, or five more years, that’s something you saved from the junk heap."
While there are no publicly available statistics on the number of PMAs in Singapore – the aids do not have to be registered with authorities, unlike the speedier personal mobility devices (PMDs) – the proportion and number of seniors in Singapore will only grow every year.
By 2030, one in four people here will be aged 65 and over. Presumably, the need for PMAs will similarly increase.
Though there are certain segments of PMA users giving these devices a bad rap – either by illegally modifying them, or misusing them as personal vehicles or to work as a delivery driver – Kelvin hopes to see regulations which don’t affect “people who really need them”.
Spearheading a repair hub for PMAs
Even though Kelvin is already doing plenty, he isn’t planning to stop here. There is only so much his pair of hands can do.
The silver is currently focusing on overhauling the company’s website and social media pages, using the skills he learnt from a digital marketing workshop funded by his SkillsFuture credits to boost his online footprint.
Looking further, he hopes to eventually grow his mentor’s cottage PMA repair business into a full-on community repair hub with access to social welfare resources and a larger engineering team.
Until then, he’s happy to plug away.
