September 2, 2013 at 13:44Father remade adult automatic wheelchair for his child
A wonderful example of how the knowledge and skills in electronics and programming helps in everyday life and in a not very pleasant situation was shown by the father of two-year-old Alejandro named Shea: he managed to apply his skills to help his son live a richer and more interesting life. Interestingly, despite the fact that the basis of the story is a blog post dating back to July, on the Internet they paid attention to it only in connection with the publication of a video on YouTube a couple of days ago.
Alejandro was born with a rare genetic disease - spinal muscular atrophy(Spinal Muscular Atrophy - SMA). The disease leads to extreme weakness in the muscles of the body and does not allow it to actually move fully: Alejandro eats through the tube and requires special ventilation for breathing. At the same time, the cognitive functions of the brain do not suffer (only motor skills are affected), so the child is able to fully understand what is happening to him. In this case, the only way to move to some extent on your own is to use an automatic wheelchair.
Medical insurance for the Alejandro family turned out to be useless - it was necessary to wait as long as five years before the moment such a chair could be obtained. For Shi, this was unacceptable, but since his qualifications (he calls himself quite brightly - engineer, programmer, builder and all around hacker) was high enough to resolve the situation on its own, Shi purchased on Ebay a relatively cheap (for $ 800) adult Invacare TDX3 chair, which he had to seriously redo.
In addition to changing the size of the chair for the child and installing additional electric batteries (which were not included), the main difficulty was the modification of the chair control system for a two-year-old, limited in the child's movements. Since Alejandro’s fingers weren’t enough for this, Shi created a special chair control system using his legs, which looks as follows:
As a result, the work was completed and, moreover, little Alejandro was able to quickly learn the chair control system hitherto unknown to him. Father posted the video of this process on YouTube:
A full description of the actions of Father Alejandro to remake the chair can be found on the website he specially created for this .
Alejandro was born with a rare genetic disease - spinal muscular atrophy(Spinal Muscular Atrophy - SMA). The disease leads to extreme weakness in the muscles of the body and does not allow it to actually move fully: Alejandro eats through the tube and requires special ventilation for breathing. At the same time, the cognitive functions of the brain do not suffer (only motor skills are affected), so the child is able to fully understand what is happening to him. In this case, the only way to move to some extent on your own is to use an automatic wheelchair.
Medical insurance for the Alejandro family turned out to be useless - it was necessary to wait as long as five years before the moment such a chair could be obtained. For Shi, this was unacceptable, but since his qualifications (he calls himself quite brightly - engineer, programmer, builder and all around hacker) was high enough to resolve the situation on its own, Shi purchased on Ebay a relatively cheap (for $ 800) adult Invacare TDX3 chair, which he had to seriously redo.
In addition to changing the size of the chair for the child and installing additional electric batteries (which were not included), the main difficulty was the modification of the chair control system for a two-year-old, limited in the child's movements. Since Alejandro’s fingers weren’t enough for this, Shi created a special chair control system using his legs, which looks as follows:
As a result, the work was completed and, moreover, little Alejandro was able to quickly learn the chair control system hitherto unknown to him. Father posted the video of this process on YouTube:
A full description of the actions of Father Alejandro to remake the chair can be found on the website he specially created for this .