UniStand

Over 4,000 pediatric patients with cerebral palsy or a traumatic brain injury struggle to control one of their arms and one or both of their legs. These children cannot walk and are unnecessarily confined to wheelchairs, despite being able to stand with assistance. This confinement to a seated position limits their independence and exposes them to social stigma, depression, and anxiety due to their inability to meet their peers at eye level and take part in standing activities. Prolonged sitting also causes severe physiological consequences, including deep vein thrombosis, muscle atrophy and poor respiratory and cardiovascular health – issues that can be alleviated with just a few hours of standing each day.

Although these children would greatly benefit from a method of standing mobility, current options like motorized standing wheelchairs are extremely expensive, unreliable, and fail to provide the physical benefits of manual self-propulsion. Current mechanical standers cannot be propelled with one arm and are therefore unusable by this underserved population.

Team UNIStand is designing and building a mechanical, one-arm-drive mobile stander. Both cost-effective and reliable, the AgileStand is more financially accessible than competing devices. The stander allows users to propel themselves and control the direction of the stander using only their unaffected arm. It also allows users to maintain a prone standing position and put weight on their legs while being comfortably supported by the stander. UNIStand’s AgileStand mitigates the adverse mental and physiological health problems caused by prolonged sitting and enables users to achieve greater independence.