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Our child has a form of cerebral palsy that inhibits her from having a full range of motion in different areas of her body.
The child only has motion in one arm. She needs a table with a system that allows her to move with only one arm while still seated so that she can reach all areas of the table.
The requirement we intend to satisfy is a chair and table system that enables her to pull herself to different parts of the table. This way she will not be restricted to what she can grab and have access to. The main goal is to make sure she feels just as capable as other children around her. This can be satisfied by a chair and rail system accompanied by a table. Constraints include the child’s growing in size and also her lack of strength. The friction loss on the chair and rail system will need to be minimal.
The chair needs to be adjustable in height as well as have head support. A gaming chair with some modifications could fit this need.
Our first design idea is a simple rectangular table with a rail system mounted along the length of the table. The table would have a bar mounted to it that the child could grab to pull herself around. This design sacrifices table length for room at the end of the track to get into the chair.
This design is similar to design 1, except the it uses the full size of the space in the home for the table.
The third design is a semicircular table with a rotating chair in the center.
Here is the design matrix we used to select the best design. As you can see, we concluded that Option 1 was the best choice.
The goal for this analysis was too evaluate the forces on the carriages attached to the chair. on the rail. Attached below is the work. It was calculated that each carriage should be able to support 100lbs each in the vertical direction. The chair assembly should be rated for 400 lbs.
The second analysis was calculating the mobility of the chair assembly. Our group thought it would be a good idea to use a calculation that we all learned in class. We determined that the mobility is 2. This makes sense because the chair can move horizontally and the chair can be adjusted up and down. Attached below is the work.
The third analysis was to calculate what the forces would be on each ground contact point for table. This calculation was determined to be around 85 lbs per contact point when the table is loaded with 100lbs.
