Allison interviews Celeste D’Costa from Imaginable Solutions about their Guided Hands assistive device for people with limited hand mobility. The device enables anyone with limited fine motor skills to write, paint, draw, and access technology.
Guided Hands does what the name says: it promotes guided hand movements. It has a 2-D sliding system that encourages the use of gross motor skills in the shoulders, rather than the limited fine motor skills in the hands.
Guided Hands has a utensil holder that is multipurpose and compatible with pens, pencils, paintbrushes, markers, and styluses. To control the utensil, the user places their wrist in an ergonomic wrist rest with an adjustable strap. The device is equipped with ambidextrous handpieces that are tailored to accommodate various levels of hand mobility.
Learn more at https://www.imaginablesolutions.com/ or https://www.instagram.com/imaginable.solutions/
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Transcript of Interview:
Allison: I’m sitting down with Celeste D’Costa of Imaginable Solutions, and she’s got some crazy contraption on the table here that she’s gonna let me try out, but I’ll let you explain what we’re looking at first. This is audio only, but then there will also be a video podcast.
Celeste D’Costa: Hi everyone, we are Imaginable Solutions. We make Guided Hands, an assistive technology for people with limited hand mobility. So we help people that are amputated at the wrist, missing fingers, and anyone with limited hand mobility including cerebral palsy, spinal cord and brain injury and stroke patients be able to write, paint, draw, even access technology through our sliding system here.
Allison: It looks pretty simple what I’m sitting at. There’s a maybe a 14 by 14 inch black square…
Celeste D’Costa: 15 by 15
Allison: 15 by 15 …look at me go girl, and there’s two metal rods on the sides and a mechanism that slides along it. I mean couldn’t be simpler and then there’s something I think I’m gonna put my hand in that slides right to left. Is that a good description? But then it’s more interesting after that. Describe what else is on the end of this.
Celeste D’Costa: Our sliding system here has four different hand pieces to help with different grips, hand sizes, and mobility. You can use it without any hands if you wanted to. It has a strap around your wrist that you can put around your limb and you actually are using your gross motor skills when you’re using this not the fine motor skills in your hand. So that sliding system is going to be using the strength of your shoulder instead of the fine motor skills in your hand. The hand pieces are all attached to a utensil holder and you can change out the utensil for what we have here is a marker to be able to write and draw. You can also put a pen or even a stylus if you wanted to type on a keyboard or use any sort of tablets or touchscreen devices.
Allison: Wow so there’s kind of an articulated piece that’s attached to the thing you strap your hand into. So with my hand they’re not using my fingers to do anything I can move forward and back and right to left. I can rotate up and down. So that I would have to have a fair amount of control of my arm and shoulder with it like that right?
Celeste D’Costa: Yes so you’re using those gross motor skills. They’re a bit of a bigger muscle group so it’s a bit easier but you can move near frictionless. It’s very smooth and you don’t have to rely on your finger strength or those limited mobilities in your palm as well.
Allison: All right now at the one right next to us they’re doing the advanced class over here. Why don’t you tell us what’s good what she’s doing over there?
Celeste D’Costa: Sure. So beside you you’re seeing our adaptations kit being used. It helps with positioning targets and also building resistance in that sliding system. So without the resistance it’s very easy to move if you’re lower tone but if you need a little bit more resistance to build your muscle, if you’re in rehabilitation and those gross motor skills, or even if you have spasticity and cerebral palsy you can use more of a more of a resistance model as well.
Allison: Yeah I was thinking about that if I do have some spasticity … did I say that right?
Celeste D’Costa: Yeah.
Allison: Close anyway, is this is the the one I’m using is actually a little too easy to move. I can picture just kind of flailing forward and it’s it’s so smooth and so light I kind of feel like it would be more useful if it did have some resistance. So what I saw her do was just put some simple rubber band sort of things around it to provide that resistance.
Celeste D’Costa: Yep there’s a bungee cord that you can play with how how strong you want the resistance by how many times you wrap it around the the stands on the end of the device. But we also can add weight to the handpiece so that it adds a little bit more control. But yeah, those with low tone can use Guided Hands just as is and someone who doesn’t have a lot of muscle can use it as well but we have that really awesome adaptations kit to help gear the Guided Hands experience to the user.
Allison: What I love about this is this is so simple. It’s not a big complex piece of machinery. It’s I mean it’s light. I can pick it up … I just picture this being really easy to put anywhere and help somebody be able to have a little more fine motor control that they don’t have the ability to do with their fingers but to do it with their whole arm.
Celeste D’Costa: Yeah exactly and we actually help a lot of students in school so you can carry this device from class to class. But it really helps them access that educational material, that curriculum that they haven’t been able to access before.
Allison: This is really terrific. So it’s called Guided Hands and it’s from Imaginable Solutions. And how much does this cost?
Celeste D’Costa: So the sliding system and hand pieces are $629 USD and it comes with four different hand pieces and two different sizes so you can use it as a small child and grow into it. We really hope this is a solution for your whole life.
Allison: That’s fantastic. So if people want to learn more about Guided Hands where would they go?
Celeste D’Costa: www.imaginablesolutions.com. We’re also very active on Instagram at @imaginablesolutions as well.
Allison: Very good, thank you very much for your time.
Celeste D’Costa: Thank you so much, and thank you for spreading the awareness in your community too.
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