Father's homemade machine helps disabled son to walk (video) | Hacker News Reader

Father's homemade machine helps disabled son to walk (video)

bbc.co.uk

224 pointsunfasten44 comments

My son has cerebral palsy and I can see the immediate benefit that a machine like this would bring to him. We are currently using a similar harness on a regular treadmill, but this therapy doesn't help him learn that he needs to raise his feet and move them in a circular motion forward and then set them down again - seeing how the machine handles this using the same idea as an elliptical trainer immediately opened my eyes to the deficiencies in the approach we're using in the modern clinic we're attending. I would love to be able to help fund the development and manufacture of these devices in some way.

This is the website of the "Estimulador de marcha" were you can find all the information about the project. You can also find the inventor email address, if you want to be in contact with him.

http://www.estimuladordemarcha.com.ar/

Great find! Awesome. Thanks very much!!

You can always use kickstarter.com to fund projects like this one.

At the moment only US residents can create projects on Kickstarter. It's going to be awesome when they expand to other countries.

Most countries have their crowdfunding counterparts. There are two in Argentina:

http://bananacash.com.ar

http://proyectanos.com

Someone could do it on his behalf, no?

There is also indiegogo.com which I believe is available to anybody in the world.

What would he offer to healthy backers?

For what it's worth, his machine looks a lot like an elliptical trainer found and most gyms these days.

I was thinking the same thing, but a regular trainer has a much longer range of motion than a child can take advantage of. His looked much more kid friendly. I'm going to relatives in a few weeks and they have an elliptical trainer - I'm going to try Rowan out on it, and it if looks helpful, modding one to get rid of the handles and building a tripod would seem pretty straightforward.

It also seems to me that the distance between the feet is rather large on the ellipticals I've seen, at least for a child's hip width. I assume this is due to the large flywheel or fan used for resistance. I think the one in the video had a pretty narrow gap between the feet, probably at least partly due to a simple, narrow flywheel, since his isn't for resistance training.

I immediately started thinking about how one could use 2x4's and plywood flywheels, along with some steel rods and clamps, to mock up an experimental elliptical machine for sizing. A more permanent version should be fairly easy to make with off-the-shelf components, and some welded steel stock.

Interesting problem!

That was my first thought. I'm sure a few of us would pitch in and see if we can hack one of these together for freejack!

I'd love one :-) but there are tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of kids that could benefit from devices like these. I have no medical training, but the benefits seem obvious. Someone with some ambition would do well to track down the man that invented this and figure out a way to commercialize them. Physiotherapists are buying treadmills right now - I can't imagine that it would take much to validate these as a replacement.

It goes to show that a man's love knows no boundaries of current science and technology. Innovation driven by determination can change fates. One of the best dads ever.

Agreed, THIS is hacking.

Agreed, this is absolutely awesome and inspiring.

Father of the year.

I wish more hackers would invest their time and energies in this kind of projects. Inspiring.

My project hits this assistive technology realm, check it out if you're interested.

A one-hand keyboard layout designed for former two-hand touch typists. Based on the same muscle memory you use to type with two hands, thus extremely quick/easy to learn.

Site and PC version: http://www.onehandkeyboard.org/

Mac App Store: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/one-hand-keyboard/id465275525

Seems like an awfully high price for something that would be fairly trivial to accomplish with an AutoHotKey script. I can appreciate the ease of downloading an app ready to go, but $99 seems really high.

There are a handful of simple AHK scripts based on the same concept, but that make you hold a modifier key such as [space] to identify which key you want. The advantage of my app is that determining the characters is all done naturally and automatically via predictive-text as you are typing. Much more in tune with your muscle memory and faster and easier to learn as a result.

P.S. One of the most well-respected members of HN sells a self-described "Hello World attached to a random number generator" for $30.

I wish the HN readers would take on projects as a group. There are enough technical people that as a group would could actually accomplish a lot. I guess the trick is to find the right problems to crowdsource.

I guess the trick is to find the right problems to crowdsource.

Crowdsource that part, as well.

Great idea.

There are a bunch of statups popping up in eHealth. Two new incubators have popped up as well http://rockhealth.com and http://www.blueprinthealth.org. Stanford graduate school of business are doing some interesting things in bringing new technology into medicine from an startup perspective. http://recoveryrecord.com came out of Stanford GSB - from an Aussie female phycologist who learnt to code.

fix that extra "low priority" a11y bug in your queue. Missing/incorrrect a11y text or event is nothing to you, and an un-detourable pothole for the person relying on it.

But how do you convince a Silicon Valley venture capitalist to invest in something like this? If you say "we're building devices to help people walk" and some YC-funded group says "we're building a location-based restaurant recommendation app" who do you think is going to get millions in funding?

>But how do you convince a Silicon Valley venture capitalist to invest in something like this? If you say "we're building devices to help people walk" and some YC-funded group says "we're building a location-based restaurant recommendation app" who do you think is going to get millions in funding?

while i'd share you sentiment at emotional level, at practical level lets be just toward the VCs. They don't have the scale of money to invest into "building devices to help people walk" - to reach the stage when it can be sold (ie. FDA approved, blah-blah-blah, and without that your device would just not be able to reach the majority of the people who would need the device) it would take not millions, at the best case scenario it would take high tens of millions.

On the other side by financing "a location-based restaurant recommendation app" the VCs' millions help to generate super-wealth which can take on the next scale challenges - look at Musk for example. Unfortunately, there aren't many Musk-s around (honestly i don't undestand why whouldn't Brin or Page or Ellison do something like Musk, they even have much more money than he does (he is even not that super-wealthy, more on the lower side of the range))

Your note about FDA approvals rings true. It can take a very very long time for things to progress to the stage where they're available for sale - particularly when it comes to the medical industry. I've been watching a company that's been able to dramatically speed up the detection of things like Tuberculosis (from 21 days to 4 days), E.Coli (from up to 24 hours down to 4 hours), MRSA (up to 24 hours down to 6 hours), etc. ... and they've made what I consider to be remarkable advancements. Yet they haven't yet received the FDA approval necessary to achieve wider adoption of their technology.

http://nanologix.com/test_results.html

http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/38404/

To get silicon valley, or other investors to see the opportunity to back these types of ventures the approval process needs to be streamlined and prioritized in a way that accelerates the time-to-market for technologies that stand to benefit society on the whole.

it isn't only FDA per.se. The financial aspects of biomedical R&D is very peculiar. Different time - first half of 199x, different country - recently post-Soviet Russia, different scale of money ... i was involved in the project to secure financing (high tens of thousands of dollars, the project would have become profitable at the 3rd, possibly 2nd year - too long of a shot in the environment where trading in metals, vodka or electronics would bring 50-100% scale profits on the first turnaround, ie. on weeks, rare few months, time scale) for productization of some wonderful technology developed by a leading brain science institution. Well, we failed.

These days, with all the supposed and expected high/bio-tech boom and the marvelous advancements just around the corner, we see biotech layoffs, and a couple of PhD degreed with years of experience biomedical professionals i personally know here in the Valley can't get a job even at half what i'm making in the software. One of the reasons of such a state is that financing of the industry requires bigger scale, amount- and time-wise, of money, and thus is coming from banks and other institutions who have significantly decreased imnvestments following 2008. Talking about stimulus and the dirty cheap Federal money the banks have access to - it just isn't trickling down as lazily pumping the money though treasuries and QEs is much more safe way to profit from the money.

This is the kind of entrepreneur I hope to be someday. A man on a mission, fixing something close to his heart. Just awesome.

I have literally never seen a single video on that BBC site, on any of my machines. It just keeps loading. Is it just me?

I think there are 2 reasons videos from the BBC don't load.

The first, which I'm almost certain stops the loading, is having your Flash privacy settings to never store any information. I have mine set to ask me when a new site wants to store information, but I can't set it to "No. Don't ask me again" on the BBC because if I do then the videos never load. I have to hit the "Deny" button when it prompts me, which it does, annoyingly, multiple times throughout a single video.

The second possible reason could be blocking of ad servers, but I'm not sure about this one.

Ugh, what a stupid implementation. I'll give it a shot, thanks.

Nope. Me too. I usually just search Youtube for the same headline and a video usually turns up. I don't know who the spammer is who does it, but I'm grateful.

Me three.

There is so much inspiration here.

A father's love, creativity and the hunger to fix what is broken. Awesome!

Incredibly inspiring.

Am I the only one who finds it disturbing that a mechanic was able to accomplish something that first world medical industry said couldn't be done?

It just goes to show that if you have a disease, condition or injury, life threatening or not. It pays to self diagnose and be your own doctor. We can specialize more in our specific problem than an entire industry devoted to the body of all problems.

I think my key take-away would have been: the closer you are to the problem the better your solution can be.

I would venture to guess current therapies were developed by health professions and engineers at arms length to intended patients (via books and maybe some user-testing in constrained environments).

This solution was inspired and developed by a father who is involved with the health problem every day for long periods of time in real world situations. That provided a much better view of the problem space.

I am not sure if self diagnosing is a great idea or what I would identify as a key take-away. But accepting solutions blindly could be.

Indeed...it's really difficult (in time measures) for doctors or physicians to reach a level of familiarity with the patient on par with the relationship the patient has with his/her family, friends, etc. This inability to do so often leads to oversights.

True story.

My ex-gf started experiencing cardiac arrests in college, which is rare for individuals of her age. Of course, her parents took her to some of the top physicians in the U.S. as well as in London and they all claimed she needed a very risky surgery for her heart. The arrests were scarring her heart tissue and any new arrest could permanently damage the organ further.

The doctors knew that she would experience these arrests when she became extremely emotional or stressed out, yet couldn't pinpoint exactly what the problem was. They simply thought she had an unnaturally fast heartbeat, which led to the arrests. As her bf, I had taken her on amazing dates and watched horror movies with her, so I knew that I had put her through various emotional stages (complete with crazy fast hearbeats) without her ever experiencing an arrest.

Luckily at the time, I was studying Endocrinology in college, so I proposed that there might be particular hormones in her system that weren't being flushed out of her body...which is very dangerous because the hormones can continually innervate vital organs; in my gf's case, her heart.

Sure enough they found that her body wasn't producing the correct enzymes to degrade the hormones and so she began a regimen of artificial hormones. I am proud to say that in the 4 years since she has been on the treatment, she has been perfectly normal! And all without any damn surgery.

I'm not a medical professional, but I knew my gf in and out. I think that the medical world would greatly benefit if there was some sort of greater collaboration between patient and doctor. Doctors are so busy that they don't have time to really understand the patient outside of the ailment at hand. At the same time, I understand how busy doctors are and how detached they must remain in order to maintain objectivity and professionalism.

I'm going thru something similar right now with a loved one and my experience is the same. Patient-Doctor (or in our case Patient Party-Doctor) rapport is the most important thing to a better outcome. Doctors are far more willing to listen and work with you when you can establish 1) you have objective goals in mind and 2) you've done your homework.

Thanks for telling your story.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com