Smiles in Motion: a New Beginning
Cerebral palsy is a group of conditions that impact movement and posture, often resulting from damage to the developing brain, typically occurring before birth. Lisa (*) faces daily challenges due to her condition as the symptoms of CP affect her posture and movement. Her regular hand control often leaves her fatigued and it also contributes to uncomfortable positioning in her chair. In her quest for freedom and comfort, she discovered the new mo-vis Head Control!
Lisa is a teenage girl from Belgium with CP. When we met her at her school, she was driving with the regular hand joystick of the chair (but with an adapted handle). Although she could drive well, there were two problems:
- She got fatigued during the day, at which point it became difficult and painful for her to drive
- She did not want the joystick at midline position, but the current position caused her to have bad posture in the chair, which became painful as well
Always smiling, she was very keen to try out our new Head Control!
The Head Control was placed on her chair and a button was placed on her knee. She would use this button to toggle from forward to reverse driving. She started off with the default settings and sped off!
Pretty quickly we could see that she liked this new solution. Together with the dealer, some parameters were adjusted:
- The minimum and maximum force were set to her capabilities. It is very easy to do so on-board and ask the user to rest on the pad and put pressure. These values can then be saved in the Head Control.
- Overload force detection: during a reflexive movement, she can have difficulties releasing the pad. As soon as the maximum pressure was surpassed by 25%, the system went into a warning state where driving is temporarily suspended.
She went on to try the system at home and during her other activities and loved how easy it was to drive with the Head Control.
We are very grateful to our dealer Mobility Concept for their help during this validation, as well as to Lisa and her caregivers.
(* Lisa's real name is changed for privacy reasons)
Want to learn more?
Introducing the Head Control
