This week, we finished writing and editing the progress report. As before, Katelyn focused on feedback mechanisms, Emma focused on sensors, and Thom focused on methods of computation and transmission of data. It was printed and submitted on Friday morning. The majority of this work was in compiling research, describing the final device, updating the scope and specifications from the preliminary report, and formatting the paper.
In the upcoming week, we will prepare a presentation which Katelyn will deliver on Wednesday. We also plan to be in communication with people from Special School District that Dr. Klaesner has put us in contact with who have expertise on children with CP. We will also begin the process of narrowing down specific components so we can order them over break. This week, we continued to reach out to others to better understand the problem. Katelyn had success in a Facebook group for pediatric physical therapy, finding several people willing to talk about their experiences with head drop, as well as with the CTO of Opter, who offered some information regarding the measurement process that their posture device used. Katie Lammers, a physical therapist, was also contacted regarding the effectiveness of different forms of biofeedback as well as general day-to-day problems that people with CP may face. We are also now in communication with Melissa Reddington, an OT in Francis Howell school district. Hopefully the feedback we get from these people will help us construct our Pugh chart for biofeedback types.
We also continued doing research on the specs of different sensors in order to make our Pugh chart for that component of our project. We are dividing our Pugh chart into several parts - the sensor, the feedback type, the component that will analyze and export the information from the sensor, and the overall device that will contain the other components. We are planning to begin writing our paper this weekend, with the goal of having it mostly written by Thanksgiving. This week, Emma visited Children’s to shadow Courtney as she went between the neurology department and cerebral palsy clinic to examine young children who may be experiencing various developmental delays. Unfortunately from an educational perspective, there were not many consults needed and none were in our target demographic. Emma did, however, see several 1-3 year old children showing early signs of atypical development, which provided some context as to how things may present early on and how other parts of the body may be affected by imbalances in muscle tone. Listening to parents talk was also helpful: it seemed that in many cases, regular access to doctor visits was not possible due to a variety of factors and they were reliant largely upon services provided by Missouri’s First Steps program, which works with schools to provide PT and OT services. This further underscores the need for a device that can be used easily at home without excessive parental interference, since First Steps typically only provides services 1-2 times weekly and parents seemed to cite time and difficulty as reasons that home therapy did not occur as often as recommended.
Our group met several times this week to brainstorm and work through project logistics, as well as to have dedicated work sessions. As of now, our solution is broken down into sensor mechanism and feedback mechanism: this will likely evolve into a progressive Pugh chart with several possible solution styles for the best choices of these two categories, as the rest of the device will depend largely on what we select to fulfill these two specific needs. Next week, we intend to start writing our paper and making concrete process on a Pugh chart to narrow down the set of solutions, allowing us to begin thinking about other design components. During this process, we hope to delve more into our designated areas of research as the project begins to have more discernible sections. We also have concrete plans to continue interacting with healthcare professionals in order to obtain feedback on which of our design directions will most likely be useful in a practical setting. We have joined a Facebook group for St. Louis Pediatric Therapy, and have asked Dr. Klaesner to put us in contact with the Special School District of St. Louis County. This week, Katelyn visited Therapy Services at the Children’s Hospital, like Thom did last week. Her experience was with patients getting checkups - seeing a PT, an orthotist, and a PA to get a general overview of their health and to make adjustments to their treatment plans. While neither patient that she saw was a good candidate for the device we are planning to build, she learned a lot about how CP patients are treated and the many factors that influence their health. In particular, she spoke to medical professionals about the routine care that many CP patients receive. One of the patients she saw attends a school designed for students who have CP and other disabilities. We are hoping to speak with therapy programs in schools to understand what our patients’ capabilities are and the kind of treatments they currently do on a regular basis. Understanding the needs of patients and the environment they are usually in will be critical for designing a device that will be useful.
Because we have been struggling a bit with managing our time, we made a concrete plan to distribute research and work. We set an open-ended time to brainstorm for this upcoming Sunday, during which time we plan to have a dedicated research, brainstorm, and work session to give us a base of knowledge from which to move forward and some potential solutions to investigate. After narrowing our brainstorming list somewhat, we will go through these solutions with Courtney as well as any other PTs/OTs who work with the target population. In order to best understand the problem, we also are compiling a list of groups and people to reach out to for information. In the next week, we will begin to contact them and, if necessary, set up times to meet and/or talk with them about their experiences. These groups and people include Beth O’Neal, First Steps, posture support device companies, special education schools, and families of children with CP. We also will be touching base with Courtney soon after we develop preliminary results of brainstorming. |
Authors
Thom Ellison, Emma Huff, Katelyn Miyasaki Archives
April 2019
Categories
|