For many parents, taking their babies on a walk or cradling them to sleep is a blessing that’s easy to take for granted. But for Jeremy King, it’s something he feared he would never be able to do.That was until a group of high school students in Maryland designed and built a wheelchair stroller attachment so that people with disabilities could walk their babies.The idea was born when students at Bullis School, a private K-12 school in Potomac, discovered that one of their teachers was expecting a baby, and her husband, who had impaired mobility, may never be able to walk his own child.In 2017, Chelsie King, a 32-year-old middle-school theater teacher at Bullis, had been engaged to her now-husband Jeremy King, 37, for only three months before they discovered he had a brain tumor. That October, he underwent an eight-hour surgery to remove it, and was left with a number of challenges, including an inability to balance. He was a nurse anesthetist who had traveled to Africa for medical missions before the surgery.
A project driven by empathy
Since the baby was expected to be born in early March and the students began their project late November, they had about three months to come up with an idea and successfully execute it.Jacob Zlotnitsky, 18, was one of the 10 students in Zigler’s class who dedicated his winter semester to creating the WheeStroll. For Zlotnitsky, the project was more than a class assignment — for that portion of his senior year, it was his purpose.Zlotnitsky and his classmates began by brainstorming various ways to transform the wheelchair into a device that could either accommodate a baby carrier or stroller.
After interviewing the expecting couple, the students learned that their device would have to meet three design requirements: It had to be safe, easy to maneuver, and something Jeremy would be able to attach and detach without help from anyone else.The device was tested with Jeremy before the baby was born, and the students continued to add more safety features and small adjustments.After weeks of trial and error, the students successfully created two designs: the WheeStroll Wheelchair Stroller Attachment, which uses a metal structure attachment to connect a car seat to a wheelchair, and the WheeStroll Wheelchair Stroller Adapter, which uses 3D-printed parts to attach an entire stroller to a wheelchair.
Courtesy CNN
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