They Have Designs on Aiding the Disabled : TRW Engineers Customize Products to Make Life Easier for Daniel Freeman Patients

For years, therapists at Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital in Inglewood wondered what to do about Lloyd Galloway Jr., 43, who has cerebral palsy and cannot speak.

To help him communicate, his family had bought him a $3,600 laptop computer that produces a synthetic voice when letters are typed on its keyboard.

But when a table was mounted on his wheelchair to hold the computer, Galloway, who has limited use of his arms and hands, was unable to reach most of the keys. The computer, purchased five years ago, went unused.

After puzzling over Galloway’s dilemma for several months, a group of space engineers from TRW in El Segundo came up with a solution. They designed a table that slides on a set of ball bearings left over from a satellite project. Built in a machine shop at TRW, the table gives Galloway access to the entire keyboard.

Galloway is still learning how to use the computer. But his father, Lloyd Galloway Sr., said the sliding table has opened up his son’s world, allowing him to communicate ideas he never before could express.

“For years and years, we have only been able to communicate with him with gestures,” said his father, a retired pastor. “But now he can tell us what’s on his mind. It’s a wonderful innovation of functions (that allows him to) have a whole life.”

Galloway is among more than two dozen disabled people whose lives have been improved by an award-winning volunteer program that taps the design talents of TRW engineers to help patients at Daniel Freeman hospital.

In the past two years, 44 TRW engineers have spent more than 600 volunteer hours designing and modifying equipment for people suffering from a range of disabilities, including paralysis and speech problems. Their goal is to modify medical equipment currently on the market to help people with special needs.

The engineers, for instance, adapted a sewing machine for people who cannot use a foot pedal. They designed a device that helped a car accident victim learn how to walk without a limp. They also developed a software program that helps stroke victims relearn how to put sentences together.

Medical equipment manufacturers who may fear they will be priced out of the marketplace by engineers volunteering their talents need not worry: The engineers have a strict policy against earning money on their designs.

“If we made the best device in the world for a stroke victim that causes some company to go out of business, that wouldn’t really help the community,” said Anderson Shaw, manager of community relations for TRW’s space and defense sector.

Some manufacturers caution that jury-rigged equipment may be less dependable and more difficult to fix than commercial models. However, the engineers are planning follow-up appointments with patients to make sure modified equipment is functioning properly.

“We try to take devices that you can’t find in catalogues and try to meet the special needs of people (for whom) you just cannot go out and buy equipment,” said engineer Ted Nye, 36, who helped design Galloway’s sliding table. “Our intent is not to compete with (medical equipment manufacturers). But we do want to develop devices for people that (manufacturers) are unwilling to build, or, if they did, the cost would be totally prohibitive.”

The explosion of technology in the health-care field has given disabled people more opportunities than ever before to lead full and productive lives, medical experts say. Yet, they add, disabled people are denied access to the latest equipment because it can be so costly to adapt devices to meet their needs.

The partnership between TRW and Daniel Freeman hospital, which won an award for volunteerism from the American Hospital Assn. last month, illustrates how the medical community is trying to bridge the gap.

The idea of linking volunteer engineers with the medical community is not new. In 1981 mechanical engineer John Staehlin of Baltimore founded Volunteers for Medical Engineering, a nonprofit organization that uses volunteer engineers to solve problems faced by people with disabilities.

The organization, with chapters in 12 states, has more than 1,000 volunteers. Staehlin, who has spent years encouraging engineers to help disabled people, recently lost an eye to cancer.

“I’ve made many speeches when I’ve told people in the twinkling of an eye you can be a person with disabilities,” Staehlin said. “Now I’ll have to modify that to say in the twinkling of an eye, I became a disabled person.”

Staehlin’s crusade on behalf of volunteerism helped inspire the partnership between TRW and Daniel Freeman hospital, said Shaw.

Since 1989, the company’s engineers have worked in small groups on 35 projects for patients referred to them by the hospital. The engineers, who meet once a month to discuss their projects, work closely with hospital therapists to design practical solutions for patients.

TRW donates more than brainpower--it also helps finance the projects. In the past three years, the company has given the hospital $14,000, plus several wheelchairs and computers.

In one of the partnership’s least expensive projects, a group of engineers designed a device that helped train a 14-year-old boy who had been in a car accident how to walk without a limp. The $30 device--a footpad equipped with sensors linked to a lighted display board--helped correct the boy’s limp by showing him how much pressure he was putting on various parts of his foot.

For a law office employee with cerebral palsy who was having trouble turning pages in three-ring binders, the engineers extended the arms of an electronic page turner that previously worked only on hardback books. The modified device was thousands of dollars cheaper than a top-of-the-line commercial page-turner.

Sometimes the engineers’ answers are decidedly low-tech.

A young man with cerebral palsy had a job at a movie house, but he had trouble tearing tickets in half. After spending hours trying to design a ticket-tearing machine he could safely operate, the engineers came up with this solution: they suggested he ask moviegoers to tear their own tickets.

“It sounds funny but it worked,” said Rosemary Martinoff, a speech pathologist at the hospital’s communication disorder clinic, who helps coordinate the program.

Not all of the projects have had happy endings. One, to help a disabled woman write on a computer using Morse Code, was cut short when she was killed in a car accident last May. The woman, Linda Knipps, an activist for the disabled, “was a very dynamic woman,” said Ann Weichbrod, an electrical engineer who had worked on the project. “I was really sad about (her death).”

Although the project has been shelved, engineers and hospital therapists said they will resurrect it when they find another suitable patient.

In the early days of the partnership, the engineers worked on projects tailored for individual patients. Recently they have begun to work on devices for general use in the hospital’s rehabilitation center.

An example is a sewing machine modified to be operated with a hand lever.

Earlier this week, accountant Doris Lawrence, 68, who has been in a wheelchair since she broke her knee three months ago, pushed a knob with her palm to demonstrate how the sewing machine works.

Lawrence, who makes her own clothes as a hobby, sewed several practice stitches on a swatch of blue fabric. “It’s just wonderful,” she declared. “With my broken knee, I couldn’t use a foot pedal. But this is really easy.”

Nye, who designed the mechanism that allows the sewing machine to be operated by hand, beamed as he watched Lawrence at work.

“The real reward,” Nye said, “is seeing the patient use the stuff. Using your time to make life a lot better for somebody with disadvantages is, I think, where engineering is at its best.”