Cerebral Palsy Standing Frame - A Work in Progress

I started work on a massage table while I was back in Perth, but the move meant I couldn't visit the Physiotherapists who were going to help. The idea of making something useful has a lot of appeal.

A chance conversation in Melbourne led to a visit to Yooralla where I met Brooke. I was lucky enough to spend a couple of hours at Yooralla and the Glenroy School with Brooke and their resident Engineer, Andrew, who modifies so much of their equipment.

Andrew and the Physiotherapists at Yooralla provided plenty of suggestions for me to work with. These included keeping the cost down, allowing standing or supine postures and permitting hip manipulation. If I could make it look more like sporting equipment and less like biedermeier furniture, I'd be happier with the result too. I wrote a brief from the my notes and photographs on the visit that fully explains my objectives that can be viewed here.

It had to be easily portable, ideally, so it could be loaded into the boot of a family sedan by one person. This pointed to a tubular frame but with more flexibility of use and storage than the middle example above.

So the sketching began:

With most of the ideas broadly established I started a sketch model to see what gravity made of my ideas.

A conversation with a very clued-up guy called Tarquin Black has led me out of a dead-end I found myself facing. Economically acquiring and bending oval-section alloy tube for the legs has been a concern all along, but Tarquin (a fellow Cradle To Cradle fan) suggested experimenting with rattan. It sounds like a vary interesting material!

Work on this is intermittent, but the back burner's never turned off.