Baby Blue Bus: Creating a Novel Baby Transportation Device for Disabled Parents
Caleb Steeby, John Oraa, Keon Beigzadeh, Grace Townley, Tejaswini Reddy, Margaret Lasonde, Mina Kim, Mariyah Kapuswala
We are Baby Blue Bus, the child transportation team. This year our goal is to develop a device that will allow a parent with cerebral palsy to easily and safely move a child around the house. Cerebral palsy affects a person’s ability to move, and maintain balance and posture which can make moving a child around the house very difficult. Some devices do exist to aid in moving a child around the home such as baby bouncers, but they are not inclusive to the population of parents with cerebral palsy. Parents have to modify existing devices, such as the Ingenuity InReach Mobile Lounger and Bouncer (pictured), which results in a decrease in safety and performance of the device. The device we are creating will utilize some features of bouncers such as the InReach, but will also add much needed features such as height adjustability, a reclining option, better wheels and removable liners.
In the beginning weeks of the year our team focused on extensive market research in hopes of finding a starting point to develop our prototype from. We were given some starting points from our community partner who had spent extensive time searching for a device that could meet their needs. Unfortunately even with these starting points we found the market for inclusive baby transportation devices is almost non-existent. However, we did learn a lot from our market research and plan to implement several features such as wheel locking mechanisms, and a safety harness that will be more comfortable for the child. We were able to find certain features that seemed to work well, and others that should be avoided, such as flimsy wheels and clips or snaps which require lots of dexterity to use. Our market research was inspiring for our team and increased our drive and passion to create a device that is inclusive to parents with cerebral palsy,
After our market research we developed two design options. Option one was starting with a walker and option two was starting with a bouncer similar to the InReach bouncer picture above. These two options would incorporate many of the same design features, with the main difference being the base we would start with. We knew that starting with the walker would make implementing better wheel and height adjustability much easier, but would make designing the portion of the device where the baby sits difficult. On the other hand, starting with a baby bouncer would make implementing height adjustability and better wheels more difficult, but designing the portion of the device where the baby sits would be much easier. We wanted to weigh the pros and cons between each to ensure that we started with the best base possible. After looking in depth at the pros and cons we found that both options had several pros and were both similar in cost so we decided to utilize DR #1 to gain some more insight.
We took both of these design options into Design Review #1 in hopes of getting some input from our community partner and other reviewers. However, after reviewing both designs there still seemed to be no clear front runner. So, shortly after DR #1 we made the decision to start designing from scratch using PVC as our prototyping material. We decided that building our own base frame would allow us to make the device as inclusive and accessible as possible, and ensure that all our design features would be included. Currently, we are working on developing the design for our first prototype and have split the work into two sub teams, the top half and the bottom half. The top half team is working on developing the base frame and the height adjustability, while the bottom half team is working on developing where the child will sit, working on removable liners and the reclining option. Our goal for Design Review #2 is to have a physical working prototype, so we can gather feedback and use that feedback to perfect our design for DR #2.
