Father redid adult automatic wheelchair for his child
A wonderful example of how knowledge and skills in electronics and programming help in everyday life and in a little pleasant situation was shown by the father of two-year-old Alejandro named Shi (Shea): he managed to use his skills to help his son live more rich and interesting. by life. It is interesting that, despite the fact that the story is based on a blog entry dated back to July, it was turned to the Internet 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 of the muscles of the body and does not allow to actually fully move: Alejandro eats through a tube and requires special ventilation for breathing. At the same time, the cognitive functions of the brain do not suffer (only motility is affected), so the child is fully aware of what is happening to him. In this case, the only way to get around on your own is to use an automatic wheelchair.
Medical insurance for the Alejandro family was useless - it was necessary to wait as much 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 as a engineer, programmer, builder and all around hacker ) were high enough to resolve the situation on their own, Shi bought relatively cheap (for $ 800) adult chair Invacare TDX3, which he had to seriously redo.
In addition to changing the size of the chair under 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 movement of the child. Since Alejandro’s fingers didn’t have enough capacity for this, Shi created a special system for controlling the chair using his legs, which looks like this:
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As a result, the work was completed and, moreover, little Alejandro was quite capable of quickly assimilating the hitherto unknown control system for the chair. The video of this process the father posted on YouTube:
A full description of the actions of his father Alejandro to remake his chair can be viewed on the website he specially created for this purpose.
Alejandro was born with a rare genetic disease - spinal muscular atrophy (Spinal Muscular Atrophy - SMA). The disease leads to extreme weakness of the muscles of the body and does not allow to actually fully move: Alejandro eats through a tube and requires special ventilation for breathing. At the same time, the cognitive functions of the brain do not suffer (only motility is affected), so the child is fully aware of what is happening to him. In this case, the only way to get around on your own is to use an automatic wheelchair.
Medical insurance for the Alejandro family was useless - it was necessary to wait as much 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 as a engineer, programmer, builder and all around hacker ) were high enough to resolve the situation on their own, Shi bought relatively cheap (for $ 800) adult chair Invacare TDX3, which he had to seriously redo.
In addition to changing the size of the chair under 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 movement of the child. Since Alejandro’s fingers didn’t have enough capacity for this, Shi created a special system for controlling the chair using his legs, which looks like this:
')
As a result, the work was completed and, moreover, little Alejandro was quite capable of quickly assimilating the hitherto unknown control system for the chair. The video of this process the father posted on YouTube:
A full description of the actions of his father Alejandro to remake his chair can be viewed on the website he specially created for this purpose.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/192220/
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