Feasibility study of robot enhanced mobility in children with cerebral palsy

Mobility is a causal factor in infant development. Neural impaired Infants, e.g., born with cerebral palsy (CP), have motor disability and are at risk for further developmental delays due to lack of self-generated mobility. It is possible that these impaired infants may benefit from robot enhanced mobility where they learn to drive a robot via a joystick, i.e., the mobility comes from the robot but the infants control the motion via a joystick. It is our hypothesis that such an enriched mobility experience will minimize delays in attaining other social and developmental childhood milestones. However, presently, there are no reported studies if children with CP would learn to drive a robot using a joystick and if they will sustain interest in doing so over multiple days of training. Also, it remains to be seen if such a robot enhanced mobility will impact development scores in this group of children. In this feasibility study, we use a special purpose robotic chair driven by a joystick to encourage infants and toddlers to drive. The study involved 20 children with CP in progressively difficult driving tasks over 10 sessions of training 20 minutes each. We found that after multiple training sessions, all children advanced in their driving skills and benefited in GMFM-88 functional scores.