A swing designed by CU-Boulder engineering students for use by people with disabilities will be on display at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C., March 9-11, as part of an exhibit sponsored by the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance.
The exhibit, called "March Madness for the Mind," will feature 13 student inventions from colleges and universities in California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Nevada, Pennsylvania and New York. The event coincides with an NCIIA conference on creativity and technical entrepreneurship in higher education.
"Just as the best college basketball players gather at the Final Four in March, the best college inventors will gather at the Smithsonian," said NCIIA program manager Phil Weilerstein. "These students are entrepreneurs who have put theory into practice in a really exciting way."
The CU-Boulder invention, called the "HandiSwing" because it can be propelled solely by use of the hands, allows people with certain disabilities to enjoy recreational and rehabilitational swinging with little or no assistance.
The swing was initially developed in fall 1998 by students in a section of the College of Engineering and Applied Science聮s First-Year Projects course taught by Assistant Professor Melinda Piket-May. The students designed the swing to help a Longmont youth who enjoys swinging but whose disabilities make him unable to pump a swing with his legs.
"When students are designing a device for a real client, they bring more creativity and enthusiasm to the project," said Piket-May. "In this case, as in many others, the product appeals to an even wider audience than the original client."
CU-Boulder students Janice Huang and Sara Beck have continued to work on the design over the last year under a grant from NCIIA. Improvements have included making the swing more comfortable with the use of a SkyChair seat developed by a Boulder company and adapting it so a person could swing using only their neck muscles. Recently, with the help of Ellen Bowker, a business student at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire who spent last summer at CU-Boulder, they have been working to commercialize the product.
"It聮s a really great design 聳 there are different tension controls so you can build up strength in your upper body. When we went to Washington last summer, we also talked to a lot of people who were interested in it for school playgrounds," said Huang. She will accompany the exhibit to Washington along with Beck, Bowker and four CU-Boulder professors who are giving presentations on assistive technology and student invention at the NCIIA conference.
CU-Boulder聮s College of Engineering has pioneered student involvement in hands-on design projects starting in their first year of engineering through the Integrated Teaching and Learning Laboratory. Pursuing patents and taking student inventions to the marketplace also has been a focus of the program.
The HandiSwing was displayed locally at the College of Engineering聮s ITLL Fall Design Expo in December 1998 and December 1999. The swing also was part of an NCIIA toy design exhibit at the Smithsonian in August 1999.