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OU Health Sciences Center's Special Skateboard Helps Researchers Study Babies with Cerebral Palsy
The babies love their souped-up skateboards.
But don't worry. The people putting these infants on robotic skateboards aren't looking for another viral YouTube sensation. They're looking for a way to help babies' mobility and brain development.
Brandi Lewis tries to get her son Jayce McWilliams to follow the toy football with a robotic skateboard-type device. Graduate student Josh Southerland looks on, with Thubi Kolobe, a rehabilitation sciences professor and lead researcher. Kolobe is studying whether the device can help infants, especially those with cerebral palsy, gain mobility and ultimately boost brain development.
Enter the skateboards or the “self-initiated prone progressions crawlers.” With the baby lying belly down on the device, high-tech sensors in the baby's “sensor suit” gather information about the infant's learning and mobility patterns.
Researcher Thubi Kolobe, a rehabilitation sciences professor at the OU College of Allied Health, is using the device to see whether skateboard babies — with and without cerebral palsy — improve in problem-solving, spatial relationships, social interaction and hand-eye coordination.
It's plain old fun, from a baby's point of view. Seven-month-old Jayce McWilliams looked almost like a biker stretched belly-down on the crawler, happily pushing one way and another during a news briefing Tuesday.
“He loves it,” said his mom, Brandi Lewis. Jayce is one of the study participants without cerebral palsy. “He can go where he wants to.”
Likewise for 8-month-old Avery Lyles, said her mother, Natalie Lyles.
“It took a couple of times for her to figure it out,” she said. READ MORE...
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