While it doesn’t look like R2-D2 or the other robotic stars of the silver screen, an assistive robotic device designed and built by Rice undergraduate engineering students to help stroke and spinal cord injury survivors could be an even bigger hit. The Rice team built the robot to perform everyday tasks for patients recovering from diseases that affect motor skills and to give the patients exercise in the process. Armed with a scissorlike claw, the remote-controlled prototype can rove about and perform a variety of functions, including moving a glass of water or snatching a pen off the floor. Working at Rice’s new Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen under adviser Marcia O’Malley, assistant professor in mechanical engineering and materials science, the Rice team included bioengineering students Christine Moran ’09 and Austin Mueller ’09 and mechanical engineering students Claire Krebs ’09, Beth Rowan ’09 and David Meyer ’10. To manipulate their remote-controlled robot, Rice team members use an instrument designed by O’Malley called an exoskeleton. In a rehab setting, this device would be attached to one of the patient’s arms. Using the exoskeleton could help patients build endurance by gradually increasing their range of motion and the amount of exertion required to operate the robot. Before the students started the project, they conferred with people recovering from stroke or spinal cord injuries at the Institute for Rehabilitation and Research, Memorial Hermann, a rehabilitation hospital in the Texas Medical Center, and with the physical therapists who care for these patients. The prototype rolls on treads similar to those on a tank and is less than 20 inches tall and about 18 inches by 18 inches at the base. It is equipped with lifts designed to raise a grabber to the height of a table for access to glasses, utensils and dishes, which is no easy task since its maximum height is around 3 feet. Tests are being planned to see how well the prototypes work on patients in a realworld environment. —Rob Cahill
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The hot cot design team includes (clockwise from left) Mimi Zhang, Lindsay Zwiener, Larissa Charnsangavej, Richard Romeo and McKenzie Smith.
Lightbulbs in a plywood box — how complicated could that be? Maybe more complicated than you think when the lives of premature babies are at stake. So when a team of Rice seniors began optimizing a low-tech incubator last spring, they were determined to take every small issue seriously. The project was a “hot cot,” a primitive device that Rebecca Richards-Kortum, director of Rice 360°, and Maria Oden, director of the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen, spotted being used at a hospital in Blantyre, Malawi. The original, designed by students in Kenya, used lightbulbs as the heating element and aluminum flashing on the bottom as insulation. Angled planks directed warm air into the top chamber. “It fills a niche between having nothing and having an incubator,” Richards-Kortum said. “It’s really designed for low-resource settings to keep premature babies sufficiently warm.” Oden instructed her team to make the device as efficient but also as inexpensive as possible. The students determined the most thermally optimal combination of design and materials by analyzing airflow to maximize heat and maintain the right amount of oxygen in the infant’s chamber, seeing how well it worked in hot and cold climates, finding the right electrical components to ensure the widest possible use and building models to test all of the above. A must for the design was that it could be constructed with materials readily available worldwide. The hot cot found a real-world trial when a team of students from Rice’s Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business, under mentor Marc Epstein, distinguished research professor of management, took the plans to Rwanda on spring break. Within five days, the team found a way to get a cot built by local carpenters, demonstrated it briefly in a clinic and worked with local officials to begin to obtain regulatory approval. Plans for the cots will be refined during the upcoming year based on feedback from the returning students. —Mike Williams
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