Developed toys to aid rehabilitation for children with diseases such as cerebral palsy.
Context
Brain injury, cerebral palsy, and other neurological conditions create profound movement disorders in children, often leading to impaired use of one or both arms. Rehabilitation with physical therapy is critical for functional recovery and play is the ideal means to provide this therapy.
Solution
BCA was part of a research partnership to develop high-tech toys to assist in the rehabilitation of these children.
Rehabilitative Toys Electronics Overview
The radio remote controlled (RC) car and the slot car toys have similar requirements for their operation. There are three major requirements on the electronics. They are:
- Sense inputs
- Effect motion
- Log operation
Therefore, a lot of the features of both the systems are the same. We’ll discuss the similarities first and then comment on the differences.
The electronics measures the change in hand position. If the position of the user’s hand has changed enough, the system logs that motion to its internal memory. Because the electronics has an internal clock, it can also associate each motion with the time when it occurred. A USB “device” interface is included so that this historical log of the user’s actions can be downloaded for future evaluation. These operations are coordinated by an on-board microprocessor.
The software is designed such that there are very few differences between the software for each toy. The software for both devices has been written in a way that allows many of its features to be configurable. By using the USB interface you can change these parameters as well. These configuration values are also stored in the product’s memory so they will be persistent between periods of use.
Slot Car
The control of the slot car had to be completely changed from the version provided by the original slot car controller that came with the track. The current driven to the car on the track had to be controlled by the microprocessor rather than a human. Special electronics were added to allow the microprocessor to determine the appropriate current driven to the slot car based on the position of the user’s hand.
The slot car electronics is not battery operated so its power section is much different than the RC car. Also, the slot car has two buttons and a knob that the therapist can use to properly configure the device to the abilities of the user. These allow adjustment without the use of the USB port. The three variables that can be changed in this way are the start position of the controller handle, the position for which the maximum car speed is achieved, and the maximum speed of the car. A bar code device is used to uniquely identify each user.
Radio Controlled Car
The electronics for this device are designed to be battery operated. Four AA batteries are used to provide the power. The other difference in this device is the radio frequency (RF) transmitter. A special frequency synthesizer was incorporated in the design so that RC cars that have different frequencies could be controlled by the same controller with a simple change in a software setting. This is done to allow operation of more than one car in the same vicinity.