Upper limbs are not suitable to provide mobility for a long time. Pushing a manual wheelchair is inefficient and might cause serious upper body overloading. Long-term wheelchair pushing almost inevitably leads to steadily deteriorating physical capabilities for the user. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that at least 1% of the world's population uses a wheelchair. Novel multidisciplinary teams and processes, working with lean innovation and validated learning approaches are the key to design, develop and provide new categories of assistive technologies that can further improve the health, quality of life, and autonomy of this large number of people by addressing important unmet needs.