A man on a moped crashed into a man in an electric wheelchair the other night in the middle of Fourth Street. There on the front page of the paper was a police tape picture of one of those objects we see all over. The wheeled mobility industry calls it a power chair.

They're everywhere, it seems, dotting the downtown streetscape, a kind of ant trail from the condos to the Publix and back.



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Truth is, though, power chairs and mobility scooters are far from just a Florida phenomenon, and mishaps are not unusual. A 60-year-old man in Minnesota took his scooter to the store to get some Jell-O and ended up under a Ford Expedition. A 70-year-old woman on a scooter got hit by a Chrysler in Nebraska. A 79-year-old man on a scooter drowned in a marina in South Dakota. All that's just this year. Electric mobility devices, or EMDs, are everywhere because of trends in geriatrics and bariatrics. Those are the portions of the health care industry that deal with old people and fat people. This is America, getting bigger and older, fatter and grayer, rolling into the future.

Power chairs: older and fatter Americans are on the move in Florida

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