MARS BioTech
Mars BioTech
When you sit on a chair, do you ever feel unbalanced or get tired from sitting in a specific position for a long time? Well, what do you do to be more comfortable? You adjust your seating by moving your body until you are at the right position! However, as someone on a wheelchair with Limb Girdle Muscular Dystrophy, our four year old community partner cannot without the help of others. So, we are Mars BioTech, have dedicated our team’s biodesign challenge at MedLaunch to create a method for our partner to be able to adjust het seating on her wheelchair with a seat cushion!
Our seat cushion has been developed so our partner is able to inflate and deflate the cushion manually until she adjusts her position to what is comfortable. By adjusting her position, our partner will be able to reduce pressure ulcers and skin breakdown that develop due to lack of weight distribution on her current wheelchair.
To develop such cushion, our team had to consider multiple factors to ensure the functionality of the cushion such as the cushion being easily portable so that our partner is able to use it on other surfaces other than her wheelchair such as a couch, self-adjustability of the inflate/deflate buttons so that she can do it independently, and secure attachment to the wheelchair to ensure safety of our partner.
The main components of the seat cushion are the foam which will be sandwiched between the air cells as shown in figure 3. A gel pad (figure 2) will also be placed on top of the foam for more comfort. There will be a control box placed on the arm of our partner’s chair that will include the inflate/deflate buttons as shown below in our prototype. Currently, the software parts are placed in the cardboard box (figure 1) but the final product box is being designed out of wood to fit the arm of chair dimensions. Finally, the seat cushion will be placed in a water proof cover to ensure durability for the cushion.
Going forward, our team will work on putting together the final product once we are able to get back on campus!
Sponsors
