Custom 'Rowing' Wheelchair for Teenager with Joint Disorder

Pedro, a patient at Shriners Hospital for Children, Houston has arthrogryposis, a congenital disorder causing severe limitation of movement in all his joints. Pedro's disability prevents him from pulling his arms in at the elbows – though he can push out. In addition, his wrists are locked in a rotated position. Rice University students are near completion of a four-year effort to make him a custom wheelchair, which works with a paddling motion that does not require Pedro to turn the wheels of his manual wheelchair by hand. The new chair has push-forward paddles instead of armrests. Pedro places his hands inside fabric loops and pushes to move. The spring-loaded arms do the work when it's time to pull his arms back to complete the cycle. The chair was built at Rice's Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK); the parts were fabricated and assembled there with the exception of hub-mounted transmissions on each wheel that allow Pedro to go forward and backward and also give him a neutral gear. Doctors at Shriners have suggested the wheelchair design may be suitable for people with spina bifida, cerebral palsy, and other disabilities.

Transcript

00:00:07 nice meet you has arthrogryposis which is a condition where two or more major joints don't have very good Mobility from birth on he simply doesn't have a lot of mobility in his joints so he can't walk on his own he needs a wheelchair but on top of that he can't even move his wheelchair in the typical way the way wheelchairs are normally moved because he doesn't have that kind

00:00:26 of mobility in his shoulder his elbow his wrist his hand none of it a power chair isn't an option for him because they're very very big they're very very heavy they can't get in in and out of their car he doesn't work in their home so it's just simply not an option for him so he needs a manual wheelchair that he can manually push with his own within his own

00:00:48 abilities when I first got got here people had to push me around almost well the whole time cuz I cann't move the Wich by myself the project to develop a better wheelchair for Pedro was actually pitched in ng10 and spring 2011 that was the first semester that engineering 120 was offered at Rice what I quickly learned is that the project was very

00:01:13 challenging for first year engineering students over time a number of teams have tackled this problem and then finally we got a team that's stuck so I very vividly remember the day that that the project changed we didn't really think that we were going to be able to do it we were like you know when when does this end like what like when does rice say that this can't be done cuz at

00:01:35 that point we didn't think it could be done and Dr satc says you guys are the last hope so like if you guys can't do it then we tell Pedro that he doesn't get a wheelchair just like all right like this is it like failure is not an option we have to do you know anything and whatever it takes and learn everything we have to do to get this kid a wheelchair cuz we just can't failing

00:02:14 the biggest challenge with Pedro is that he can't pull his muscles back he can't retract his arms so we really had to go through and find a way that he could you know use a wheelchair and you know the rowing motion we have is great and then pulling it back has a lot of problems with it but we've faced them all and gone through to make sure that he can actually use a motion to move the

00:02:33 wheelchair so we actually found this product that exists currently called the widget which we used as our gearing system and while the widget is great we still had to make additional modifications so that Pedro could use it we have a couple of really neat features on the wheelchair one of them is we were able to take a pair of standard bicycle caliper brakes and invert their

00:02:51 Direction so that they grab onto the wheelchair in the direction not normally used in a bicycle and this allowed us to be able to change the way that typical hand caliper brakes are just a squeeze motion we were able to adjust it so that it's a knee flare um actually outwards that allows him to engage the brakes on both sides independently which gives him a greater turning radius on either side

00:03:14 we've gotten to work with a lot of different people I mean Reed is an art history major so we've spanned everywhere from engineering to even the art side of Campus I mean I had absolutely no idea but I think I came to the school with this in mind in a very abstract sense I wanted to be around something that I thought would be different than I would get going to a

00:03:36 place um perhaps more curtailed towards my particular interest and I wanted to be around this type of environment where I would be pushed in different directions uh you know to end up I guess on the what sixth floor of Shiner hospital it's been a real gift nice for the time and your everything there are enough fors to express that Pedro's Mom especially was so overcome

00:04:06 with emotion at the end and she kept saying how she didn't have the words to describe what was going on but she didn't need them because like the feeling of the moment and like the evidence of Pedro racing his sister down the hallway and being able to do all these things for the first time like that transcended like anything that words could have said

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