Robotic Arm Gives Teenager with Brittle Bone Syndrome More Independence

Dee Faught lives with osteogenesis imperfecta, a genetic condition that makes his bones especially brittle. Bioengineering students at Rice University designed the R-ARM, a robotic device for Faught that fits his motorized chair. The arm will allow Faught to perform tasks most people take for granted.

Transcript

00:00:01 [Music] I'm 17 and I from friends at Texas D has um osteogenesis and perfecta type 3 and he it's a brittle bone disease short um and so his bones are very fragile and because of that he can't like lift heavy objects or even actually light objects we take care of a lot of kids with a lot of very special needs here and it's one of the frustrating parts of of our

00:00:28 practice is that we see the needs that have that we can't fill that we can't meet for them things and sometimes are the simplest things so for example D he's got osteogenesis in perfecta which is brittle bone disease the slightest touch and he'll break he'll have multiple fractures and you would think his main complaint would be that he hurts all the time or that the bones are

00:00:45 deformed and misshaping but they're not his his biggest desire in life was to be able to reach things to reach the light switch in his own house so he didn't have to call his mom to turn his light on and off and the bugs him he's a teenager now that bugs him so it was really phenomenal to be able to work with these talented Engineers these rice students were phenomenal

00:01:01 put together a fantastic robotic arm for him to solve exactly his problem and I didn't think it was going to be like that cool of a thing I thought it would be cool but then I saw it in July and I was like it was really really cool and so now that I get it this time I can't wait what the team has done has been quite remarkable they started out with what was a class project for one

00:01:24 semester project and then persisted over a 2-year period to continue to work and to develop project so that they could deliver it to their customer um deep this team has again without the motivation of grades for say have really just taken a hold of this project um done an extraordinary job and and finished the project in a way that very few student projects finish at Rice

00:01:54 [Music] yeah first and then [Music] you it's exciting he's learning how to do it and it's neat to watch him be able to pick stuff up and to see his independence it's just really um it is exciting I just it's been an incredible

00:02:33 experience for us too we never would have thought that we would be building a robotic arm for an actual patient we would be helping people like when you come to college it's not the first thing you think of you're like oh I'm going to come to college and build something for someone so it's just been an incredible journey for us two years ago when we first started I had absolutely no idea

00:02:50 where this was going to go in fact I didn't even think that we were going to continue it um at first it was just sort of like this project that I was working on um but slowly it developed into this um personal investment this day is just amazing it's uh it's the accumulation of all our hard work and um everything since ng20 uh to our undergrad research and uh all the

00:03:14 work that we've put into this project and it's just really great to see it all come together and D actually being able to use the arm um especially since he's going to college next year as a mom it makes me very excited for him to have that Independence not to have to depend on me and his dad you know um to do everything for him you know and and I know you know he's speak to be 18 and he

00:03:37 that's that's exciting every 18-year-old wants that Independence and he's just like all the rest of the 18-y olds he wants his independence too and this will get that'll give him uh the opportunity to go out and do more things on his own [Music]