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Today on Word of Mouth, reinventing the wheelchair. We talk to an engineering student who’s working on mobility aids for developing countries. We also explore the intersection of music and healing with a pianist / surgeon, and writer Kelly Horan takes us through some of the best, non-typical new summer beach reads.

(Photo by David Squire)

Thirty-one-year-old Matt Eddy is travelling across the U.S. in his electric wheelchair to bring more attention to the needs of those with muscular dystrophy.

Matt’s journey is daunting, and he’ll certainly encounter many challenges along the way. But the fact that a wheelchair can even make it across the country – let alone from one end of a town to another – puts the U.S. in stark contrast to poorer nations.

In the developing world, 20 million people in need of wheelchairs don’t have them – and the traditional wheelchair design simply doesn’t fit the needs of people who live on rough, unpaved roads in African and Asian villages.

That’s why Amos Winter, a PhD candidate in mechanical engineering at MIT, is leading a project to build a better wheelchair – or at least one more suitable for the rest of the world. He's said that his goal is to create a chair in which the rider can comfortably travel six miles a day and that can be sold in Africa for under $150. Winter joins Word of Mouth to describe the new chairs he and his students designed - including a three-wheel design with a hand crank.

(Photo courtesy of Amos Winter)

The operating room of a hospital is a highly stressful place. Surgeons and assistants have to be extremely attentive, moving quickly but carefully. Playing music during surgeries has been shown to relax the staff and the patients. Some of the benefits that extend to the recovery room are lower heart rate, blood pressure and reduced need for pain medication.

Dr. Claudius Conrad, now a senior surgical resident at Harvard Medical School, suggests music can go even further. He’s published a paper suggesting that music can stimulate a 50 percent jump in pituitary growth hormone. The hormone is associated with stress but, paradoxically, can help exert healing. Dr. Conrad is also a classically-trained pianist with a doctorate in music theory.

Also, the study of music therapy has evolved in the United States for the past half a century, and there’s growing evidence that music is as good for the body as it is for the soul. We hear a story from Tanya Ott, news director at WBHM in Birmingham, Alabama.

(Photo by Sara Anderson)

When it comes to favorite beach blanket reads, fiction is often the first thing we pick. A saucy romance or fast-paced page turner; a dog-eared bestseller; maybe a classic re-read for the third time. But for book lover Kelly Horan, non-fiction tops her list this summer. Kelly is a writer and journalist who runs the Friday Night Authors Series at Jabberwocky Bookshop in Newburyport, Massachusetts. We asked her to tell us about two books that tell true tales, but read like the best novels.

The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball
by Nicholas Dawidoff (Pantheon)

The Mysterious Montague: A True Tale of Hollywood, Golf, and Armed Robbery
by Leigh Montville (Doubleday)