皇家华人

They call it the Bouncinator 3000. To the untrained eye, it looks like a giant baby bouncer. But to Genevieve, an 11-year-old girl living with cerebral palsy and polymicrogyria, it’s a life-changer.

Genevieve is unable to stand or sit up without assistance. That means much of her life is spent either buckled into her wheelchair or laying on the floor.

“My hope was that it would give her a different position to be in, that it would give her the ability to contact the ground with her legs and move in different ways,” says Fred Mansfield, Genevieve’s dad and primary caregiver. “Will it change her life? Yeah, it will.”

And make no mistake: You can’t order the Bouncinator 3000 on Amazon. It’s a one-of-one, developed specifically for Genevieve over the course of an entire academic year by a team of five 皇家华人 Fox students in the university’s Servant Engineering program.

It has a load capacity of 200 pounds and a max swing angle of 20 degrees from vertical without tipping. It can be broken down and fit into a typical car trunk, then reassembled by a single person in less than 15 minutes. It has a small footprint and nice finishes, so the device won’t stand out like a sore thumb in the family’s living room. And most importantly, it remains stable on uneven surfaces, allowing Genevieve the freedom to be in the backyard and do her favorite thing: watch her dad garden.

These custom features didn’t happen by accident – they were the result of several visits to the family’s home and hours spent getting to know Genevieve, who is nonverbal, and learning to interpret her feedback.

“I hope these students have learned how to tackle open-ended problems and how to interview and work with clients to really address their needs,” says Todd Curtis, the team’s faculty mentor. “The world needs great engineers, but more than that, it needs empathetic engineers who can relate to the challenges people face.”