Soft-Robotics Physical Therapy Device for Children with Cerebral Palsy
May 2020 - August 2020
The goal of this project was to build a device to help children with spastic cerebral palsy to practice daily range-of-motion therapy from home.
Our design requirements were that it had to be safe, simple, and inexpensive so that people with limited technical experience or access to tools could build it themselves. We hoped that it might help users to avoid the cost of expensive orthotics that insurance often does not fully cover.
I collaborated remotely with other students for the duration of this project. My focus was on the development and prototyping of the mechanical components of the pneumatic actuators, while my teammates tackled the electrical circuitry and sensors.
Over the course of a summer, I built dozens of fabric actuators, experimenting with different types of fabric and stitching. Many of the prototypes failed, but each iteration allowed me to get a little closer to something that would work.
I reached out to physical therapists, orthopedists, and people with cerebral palsy throughout the project to learn about the needs of our user group and what features would make our device the most useful to them.
I also read academic papers from similar projects at other institutions to investigate how they solved some of the problems we were running into. Through a combination of this research and my own experimentation, I was able to develop some prototypes that were functional enough for the first stages of testing.
Because the COVID-19 pandemic had forced us to do this research remotely, I didn't have access to any testing instruments, so I had to get extra creative with my test setup and think very critically about what features I needed to evaluate and how I could best measure them with the limited resources available to me.
I designed the circuit for an Arduino pressure sensor and connected it to a bike pump to determine which prototypes were the most efficient.
I also built a rig to measure the force that they generated. This was a big challenge because the flexible nature of the fabric actuators made them difficult to stabilize well enough to get consistent results.
My team continued this research for another year with the goal of creating a fully functioning prototype with integrated mechanical and electrical components. While our research advisor left the college before the project could be finished, it was still a valuable learning experience for all of us.