A paraplegic mom now has the ability to take her baby for a stroll thanks to a high school teen who successfully invented a wheelchair stroller.
When she was five years old, Sharina Jones was shot in the leg by another child playing with a gun. As a result, she’s spent the past 30 years learning to adapt her lifestyle. However, when she learned she was expecting her first child last fall, she encountered one problem she didn’t have an adaptable solution for.
“A lot of my friends have babies and they are out, running with their babies in the stroller and I thought, ‘What am I going to do?’” Jones told Fox 2 Detroit.
That’s when Jones learned about a partnership between University of Detroit Mercy and a local high school, which worked with students to give them college-level STEM projects.
Jones was paired with 16-year-old Alden Kane from University of Detroit Jesuit High School and Academy and over six months, he designed a wheelchair stroller to fit the new mom’s needs.
Explaining his design process, Kane told The Michigan Catholic: “It was great to meet [Jones] and talk to her about what she wants and doesn’t want. Talking to her was a big help, figuring out the workability of the device, where to put a diaper bag, whether or not she could unhook the stroller and how she can move around in the chair.”
According to Kane, the baby’s safety was his biggest priority. His second was making the stroller independent from Jones. To do this, the high school senior used lightweight steel tubes to create a front wheelchair attachment where the baby’s car seat could easily be strapped in.
“After six months of hard work, six months of working in the machine shop designing it up, it was priceless seeing the design on her wheelchair, being used with her child in it,” Kane told Fox.
Now that his invention is complete, the high school student plans to perfect the prototype and eventually patent it.
Watch the video above to see how the stroller works.
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