Kjell Groven (72) suffered a stroke and had difficulty walking up and down stairs for years – until he found the TOPRO Step stair climber

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Stroke patient Kjell Groven uses the TOPRO Step stair aid for daily stair climbing and thus trains stair climbing. (This contribution comes from the article of the Norwegian magazine “Foreningen for Slagrammede”, a magazine for stroke patients, the issue was published in June 2018): The entrepreneurs themselves have grandparents who have difficulty climbing stairs. This prompted the three young entrepreneurs in Trondheim to develop a new aid that allows for safe stair climbing and also helps to maintain walking function and muscle strength.

Many people need aids to cope with everyday life. The goal of these aids must be to make everyday life easier and to maintain or improve functions.
In Trondheim, three young entrepreneurs have specialized in the topic and developed a stair aid that allows for safe training during
rehabilitation.

Last but not least, this offers many people the opportunity to continue living at home longer without having to move the bedroom into the living room or renovate the house.

Many fall

In Norway, around 30,000 people are injured annually due to falls on stairs. About 80% of them are over 65 years old.

These were the motives for the three students Eirik Medbø, Halvor Wold, and Ingrid Lonar at the Entrepreneurship School of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology to develop the stair aid TOPRO Step in the autumn of 2011.

After the development and implementation of pilot tests with 4-5 prototypes in the years 2013 and 2014, the stairlift finally came on the market in 2015. The following year, the first private installations were carried out through the Norwegian aids center. So far, the entrepreneurs have installed more than 1000 products, from the Arctic Circle in the north to France in the south – in Norway, about 30% of those using the TOPRO Step stair aid at home are stroke patients.

One of these users is Kjell Groven (72) from Trondheim. He suffered a stroke on May 17, 2017, and has been having more and more difficulties going up the stairs at home for several years.

“I notice that the strength in my legs has been decreasing over the past few years. The same goes for my balance. My reaction time has also worsened, causing me to fall frequently. I can’t even count how many times I’ve fallen, it’s more than I can count on two hands.”

The fact that it will be three former students who will solve Kjell’s challenge of climbing stairs was not necessarily obvious – and it was purely by chance that he discovered the stair aid TOPRO Step.

“After I had the stroke and started training, I searched the internet myself for ways to adapt my stairs at home for me. We live on three floors, so I am completely dependent on climbing stairs in order to continue living at home.”

Both Kjell and his physiotherapist agreed that it was important to keep the body in motion to maintain his walking and muscle function. Therefore, a stairlift was out of the question as it would make him more passive.

“I saw online that you can test the TOPRO Step stair aid in Trondheim and then visited one of these exhibitions with my physiotherapist to try it out. It went very well and we subsequently applied for the TOPRO Step stair aid at the Norwegian Assistive Technology Center, and shortly afterwards it was installed at our place.
Without the TOPRO Step stair aid, my alternative would have been to move into a nursing home – something that neither my wife nor I wanted.”

Watch Kjell's video.

Training and safety

In collaboration with the ergo- and physiotherapists of the municipality of Trondheim and the St. Olav Hospital, Kjell has developed a fixed training plan that he tries to follow. In May, Kjell and his wife spent 14 days at their summer house in Fosen. They live on one floor there, so he could not train stair climbing there.

“I try to train getting up, walking sideways, and climbing stairs 2-3 times a day. In the two weeks that I lived on one floor, I noticed that my physical condition deteriorated because I did not receive the necessary training for my leg muscles.


It was therefore difficult to come back home and start again with the usual rhythm of movement.
The stair training is used in rehabilitation and is a good exercise for maintaining leg function directly at your home.”

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