SBIR Phase I: Development of the WeeBot, an Infant-controlled Powered Ride-on Device for Children with Motor Impairments

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this Phase I project is its innovative and potentially transformative contribution to assistive technologies for infants with motor impairment. In the United States, over 40,000 infants per year are born with conditions, such as cerebral palsy, spina bifida, and Down syndrome, that often result in motor impairment. There is currently no device that provides independent movement to infants with motor limitations. Since children learn a great deal about their physical and social environments when they begin to crawl/walk, conditions that deny or delay independent movement can impact cognitive, language, and social development. A device that will let these infants move and explore at the same age as other children could mitigate these developmental delays and facilitate full integration into society. Lifetime cost of healthcare for these children has been estimated at $250,000. Providing early independent movement could result in a potential $50,000 lifetime reduction in additional interventions such, as behavioral and occupational therapy, special education, and the need for healthcare and educational aides. This amounts to over $200,000,000 in savings per year to the health and education systems.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project addresses the need, expressed by parents and therapists, for a device that will allow infants with motor impairment to move independently at the same age as their typically developing peers. Currently, no such device is available. The intellectual merit of the proposed work is the development of a novel control method for a powered device that can be used by infants as young as 6 months old: The device moves in the direction that the infant leans (as when reaching toward a toy or parent) while preventing collisions and falls. Previous research has shown that infants as young as five months old can learn to use this control method to purposefully steer a powered device in all directions. The research objectives of this project are to build and validate a second-generation prototype that can be used by parents and clinicians outside of a research setting. Successful completion of these objectives will advance the device from a research testbed to a viable, if limited, prototype, enabling future work to evaluate the impact of the device on the development of cognitive, social, and communication skills for infants with disabilities.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.