Mark Havens
Summer is the time that Industrial Design students at Jefferson take the skills they’ve learned in the classroom out into the world via internships, startups, collaborations and competitions. To celebrate the beginning of
our Fall semester, we’ll be doing a special series of articles about the many ways that Jefferson Industrial Design students used this summer.
This summer a cross-disciplinary team from Jefferson’s Spring 2018 Healthcare and Design class won the “Most Likely to Become Commercially Available” award and second place overall in the RESNA (Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology Society of North America) Student Design Competition in Washington, DC. Out of forty teams entered, the Jefferson group was one of only seven selected to present their final project at this international competition that included entries from India and South Korea. The team designed GaitMate, a device that reduces the frequency and duration of Freezing of Gait (FOG) episodes for individuals with Parkinson’s Disease.
The team consisted of Sophomore Industrial Design students Jess Monteleone and Zach Samalonis as well as Ocupational Therapy Masters student Abigail Balster. They created the project as part of their work in Healthcare & Design, a class that brings together Industrial Design students and Occupational Therapy Masters students to collaborate on the research and design of new medical products and solutions.
A video of the prototype device can be found here: https://youtu.be/jJBoIjJmipo
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