A growing number of people worldwide are permanently or temporarily dependent on a wheelchair. In order to improve the quality of life for wheelchair-users, it is important that the wheelchair offers the greatest possible comfort on the one hand and on the other hand enables many everyday situations without assistance, while being light enough to be lifted into a vehicle by the user alone. In addition to the weight optimisation of the lift wheelchair, the main objective of the here-presented investigations is to achieve increased comfort for the wheelchair-user through more uniform actuation forces compared to the reference model. This is realised by an optimisation of the lifting kinematic and the use of flexible lightweight construction elements, also known as compliant elements, to overcome the aforementioned challenges. This paper focusses on the gear synthesis and the parametric simulation study of the compliant elements enabling a profound understanding of the wheelchair components. Based on the derived results, the lifting mechanism was optimised and the new developed wheelchair was thoroughly tested. The experimental studies show a good agreement with the analytical and numerical results and confirmed the chosen design approach and the established development process.