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Professor and students team up with
Shriners Hospital to research and prevent falls

Professor Warren Smith and six of his electrical and engineering students have a singular goal in mind:  getting kids with cerebral palsy moving and playing. And Smith and his students are working with Shriners Hospital to see if a popular treatment can do just that.

“Children with cerebral palsy have difficulty walking and playing and therefore avoid recreational activities with their peers,” says Smith, an electrical and electronic engineering professor on campus since 1973.

He and his students are tracking the effectiveness of a common therapy to assist children with cerebral palsy in ease of movement. They take “movement measurements” in the everyday living of the children.

Fall monitors, attached to the children via fanny packs, track how much the children fall and gauge the value of the treatment.

Smith and his students received funding for the project from Shriners Hospital in January 2006.

“When we found out we received the funding for the project, one of my students made a mannequin about the size of a child,” says Smith. “We did our first testing on the mannequin, whom we named ‘Pinocchio.’ The student manipulated Pinocchio to fall down in different ways and used a mathematical technique to recognize the falls.

“Based on his results, we were able to create algorithms for a fall,” Smith says.

The children’s movement was originally studied in the Motion Analysis Lab at Shriners. In the room seven cameras are aimed at a child while he or she walks down a runway to the center of the Lab to a “force plate” in the middle of the room. The cameras pick up reflective patches on the child that analyze the child’s motion. Once treatment has been given, the child walks down the runway again and the motion is analyzed after the treatment to see how it has improved the child’s movement control.

Smith and his students saw that in the tightly controlled setting of the Motion Analysis Lab, the children were trying their best to walk, but it didn’t accurately predict how the treatment would affect the child casually moving around at home or at school. Shriners hospital officials suggested that their monitoring method was a more practical technique.

The first ‘real’ children’s play session was in March 2006, and they played on an outdoor park on the Shriners campus while wearing the movement monitors. Accelerometers measured three ranges of motion: up and down, side to side, and forward and backward.

The monitors transferred and stored the movement data via a radio signal to a laptop computer located nearby. The data is analyzed while the video plays back the child’s movement simultaneously. “Through that analysis, we can train the computer to tell the difference between a jump, which the child controls, versus a fall, which the child can’t control,” says Smith.

Presently, Smith’s team is working on low-profile monitors for the children to wear during their everyday lives. They will be approximately the same size as an electronic pager.

“We knew that as engineers, we could develop a way to monitor the children in the least obtrusive way possible while the child was at home or at school,” says Smith. “So we wanted to get that data to supplement the information that was gathered at the Motion Analysis Lab. We also wanted to see if, after the treatment, the child would fall down less.

“We’re hoping this will promote appropriate treatments for these children. We just want kids to experience the joys of childhood they otherwise might not have had.”