Three Rice engineering students have built and delivered a robotic arm to a teen with osteogenesis imperfecta, giving the user the ability to pick up and manipulate objects.
Gloria Gogola, a doctor at Shriner's Hospital for Children in Houston, heard about a class at Rice where students sought out an engineering problem and worked to find a solution. Dee Faught is the seventeen year old with brittle bone disease and he met with the three students to share his condition and discuss things that he wanted to be able to do.
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Matthew Najoomi, Sergio Gonzalez and Nimish Mittal are the three students who worked on the project with Dee for two years. The teens all bonded immediately over high school stories and a love of video games. The project is a portable robotic arm to reach objects, grip objects and move objects.
The arm went through several design iterations before creating the final product. Even though the class lasted one term the students worked throughout their freshman years of college, through summer and into the next school year to finish the arm.
A Playstation controller rotates two joints and allows the gripper to open and close. Using a video game controller was already second nature to Dee so operation of the arm had a very short learning curve.
The mechanism is called the R Arm and Team Brittle Bones won the Excellence in Engineering Design award at the Engineering Design Showcase and Poster Competition in April 2013. This project received heavy attention at the end of November 2013, with articles at Laughing Squid, The Good News Network, Huffington Post, and a feature article on NPR.
My blanket statement for first year engineering students is that engineers should make the world a better place. This project is incredibly inspiring and as the students begin the process of tech transfer it will be exciting to see what the R Arm can do.
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