Cerebral Palsy device and software.
This project is about helping children with compromised muscle function that affects one of their hands, the recessive hand (RH). This could be due to any of several factors such as Erb's or Cerebral Palsy.
The proposed remedy is to encourage use the RH rather than favor the dominant hand (DH) so that correct hand development increases. The idea is to create a device requiring manipulation by the RH, while occupying the DH in keeping the device active.
In this case the device has a bush button that is to be continuously depressed by the DH, while the RH operates the device. In the first iteration, we have a push button being monitored by a Raspberry PI (RP).
When depressed, the RP starts playing music, when released, the RP pauses the music and restarts the music when subsequently depressed. This iteration does not engage the RH, but is just a proof of concept.
Next is to implement a game that is played by the RH instead of playing music. The game pauses if the DH releases the switch and continues when the DH presses the push button.
Participants.
The idea for this device was envisaged by Virginia Q-Z, COTA, OTD/S, CLT who observered the therapeutic care given to these children during her health care studies.
Virginia designed and constructed the enclosure, and is responsible for marketing the product. She recently presented the need, and demonstrated the device at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) as a potential for capstone research project and accepted as such by senior undergraduate biomedical engineering (BME) students.
The coding, circuit design and implementation for the first iteration was done by Mauro Zallocco.