The Head Pointer Project

Girls of Steel has been holding all meetings and events virtually since March of 2020, but while we are virtual, we still wanted to reach out and help the community any way we could. Early this year, we contacted a special education teacher that we have met with before, Ms. Rachel Thiros, of the Baldwin-Whitehall School District. We asked her if there were any projects we could work on from home. She gave us a project for her student, Sam, a kindergartener who has acute flaccid myelitis. Sam has minimal use of his hands, so he needs assistance with many basic tasks. A current solution for people with low hand mobility is a head-worn styluses or pointer that allows them to write and/or interact with objects. However, these can be expensive, are hard to find for children, and no one solution seemed to serve all of the purposes that Sam needed help with. Our group started to work on a solution that would allow easy adjustment while he grows and would also work in many different applications –  such as writing, painting, using a tablet, and turning pages of a book. 

We researched the pros and cons of many current solutions for head-worn styluses and other adaptive devices. We looked into ways that we could keep it on his head and came up with several ideas. After working through those ideas, we settled on using a baseball cap as a base. Within a few meetings, we had a prototype designed to share with Rachel. Our prototype consisted of a baseball cap, three 3d-printed clamps that we designed, and a wooden rod. We began printing the clamps to test their size, the size of the openings, and any other variables we felt would help. After a few iterations, we were ready to build a full prototype. 

After we assembled the full prototype and it was ready to test, we had the fantastic opportunity to meet with Sam to see how it worked. After a few adjustments, Sam was painting and writing with ease! You can see him with the hat in the videos below.

 

                       
 
                       
 

We are continuing to work on this project to improve the hat. In our next iteration we hope to give the hat a clamp with an adjustable angle and conductivity such that Sam can use a stylus on tablets and other electronics.