Engineering, Occupational Therapy Students Join Forces in Cerebral Palsy Project

A team of Ohio State engineering and occupational therapy students has developed a device to help children with cerebral palsy walk.

Mechanical engineering students Keira Gaudette, Chantale Levert and Ryan Bucio, along with occupational therapy graduate students Erin Ansley and Brianne Cattran, developed the gait trainer with features that help the children move with a more normal gait.

“It’s a different type of walker,” says Gaudette, “because it helps encourage normal gait by keeping the children upright and stabilizing their pelvis.”

Gaudette and Levert explained that children with cerebral palsy, particularly spastic cerebral palsy, often have poor muscle strength, poor balance and low endurance. Due to these physical impairments, the children are unable to stand and walk independently.

The team members worked with a 4-year-old boy named Ismael to develop improvements over a gait trainer he was previously using. Watch a video of Gaudette and Levert explaining the project and of Ismael using his current trainer and then the new trainer with the help of the students.

“When he was in our gait trainer, he was able to approach a table and play with a ball and interact with people,” Levert says.

The students worked on the project for a senior design class with mechanical engineering Assistant Professor Robert Siston, who also holds appointments in orthopaedics and allied medical professions; Jane Case-Smith, professor and chair of occupational therapy; and David Lee, laboratory supervisor for biomedical engineering. The project has received funding through an $88,263 grant from the National Science Foundation that Siston received to partner with clinical collaborators from Ohio State's Dodd Hall Rehabilitation Hospital to design and prototype custom assistive devices for persons with disabilities.

The gait trainer team then submitted its project to iDream, a new scholarship program from Honda, and won the Viewer’s Choice Award, selected via online voting. The students will split the $8,000 prize, but they also decided to donate a portion of their winnings to United Cerebral Palsy of Ohio.

“We all love volunteering,” Gaudette says, “so we wanted to give something back for research.”

The gait trainer project will be passed along so future classes can continue to develop improvements.