Published: May 15, 2008 09:16 am            

Engineering students build device to help disabled woman

NORMAN, Okla. — For Linda Shannon, independence is something that doesn’t come naturally.

So she glories in each small victory — like moving from her wheelchair to her bed without the help of any other person.

Shannon, 62, has cerebral palsy and has used a wheelchair since age 13. A new device developed by four University of Oklahoma students allows her to transfer between her bed and her wheelchair on her own.

“It’ll help me depend on me when my aides can’t get me up,” she said.

Until now, Shannon had to rely on someone else to lift her from her bed to her wheelchair and back. If the aide was late arriving or didn’t show up, Shannon would be confined to her bed until someone arrived.

“If a person gets stranded in bed — well, just imagine how you’d feel,” said Joseph S. Mecham, community service coordinator for Progressive Independence, a Norman organization that helps disabled individuals live independently.

Mecham has worked with Shannon about seven years, and said she has lived on her own since running away from a nursing home in 1980.

“I was put in an institution when I was 13 and I don’t want to see any disabled people be in a nursing home,” she said Wednesday at her apartment.

This new Assistive Transfer Device is one more step to independence.

It was created by mechanical engineering seniors Paul Schoelen, Uriah Hughes, Jared Arney and Scott Herrmann. The students received the project idea from mechanical engineering professor Kuang-Hua Chang.

Chang approached Mecham about two years ago looking for a project his students could work on. Mecham directed Chang to Shannon, who requested a bar that would help her transfer between her wheelchair and the toilet.

Last year, four seniors created that device for Shannon. This year, Shannon asked for a much more complicated device to transfer between her wheelchair and the bed.

But Arney said as soon as Chang told them about the idea, the students knew this would be their project.

He described the process as “a blessing, an opportunity to really apply what we learned in school to really make an impact on society and on someone’s life.”

It began as an undergraduate research project sponsored by the Honors College in the fall. The four seniors spent the first semester designing the plans for the device. The work was so intensive that they stretched it out into their spring semester capstone project to build and test it, Arney said.

They couldn’t find anything already in existence that would let Shannon transfer without the help of anyone else, so they took the things they liked in other machines and created this one, Arney said.

The machine cost about $2,500 to build, and was paid for through a donation. The device was installed May 7.

Shannon still will have to learn to use the product, which requires some movement and strength on her part. The device allows her to position herself in front of the machine, slide in from her wheelchair and use a remote control to direct the device to lift and then rotate her to the bed.



Julianna Parker writes for The Norman (Okla.) Transcript.