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. Comments are closed.
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Thom Ellison, Emma Huff, Katelyn Miyasaki Archives
April 2019
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