Oct. 15, 2014, is a day Richard Dries will never forget.
The roofer was at a job site, repairing a roof like he had done so many times before in his 40-year career. But that day, Dries slipped and fell slamming his face into the concrete. He suffered severe spinal cord damage and paralysis from the waist down.
In the 12 years since his accident, Dries has regained some of his mobility, but has limited range of motion and sometimes uses a wheelchair to get around. Over the past seven months, a group of students from the University of Detroit Mercy have been working with Dries to make his life a little bit easier as part of Faces on Design, a senior-level program that brings UDM’s engineering and nursing students together to create personalized assistive technology devices for community members with disabilities.
Students on Monday showed off their finished products during a presentation on the McNichols campus, which included a lift system to move items from a car to a porch and a transfer board to make it easier to move from a wheelchair to a car.
Dries’ team focused on developing a device to help him better reach and grasp items. The long, cane-like stick has seven modular attachments such as handles and hooks of various sizes, a scooper, massager and back scratcher, said engineering student Marino Bachi.
During the presentation, the team gave Dries the new device.
“We’ve been listening to Richard, making sure that his voice has been heard and that we’ve been able to come up with a prototype that is practical for his everyday life,” nursing student Mariana Mati said.
Ahmed Radwan, UMD’s dean of the College of Health Professions, said during the event that as a Catholic institution, students and staff are called to serve with compassion, to seek justice and to use one’s knowledge and talent to help others in need.
“This is what makes us unique and this is the essence of our mission,” he said. “At Detroit Mercy, we believe innovation must be guided by values and it must be ethically inclusive and centered on the dignity of every person. Students are taking the lead and this is what we hope they achieve in the future. We hope that they come together to create a real and lasting impact, a future where our graduates are not only skilled professionals, but compassionate leaders who can make change.”
Creating a new kind of tool
The Faces on Design program has been a part of UMD’s curriculum for 17 years. The two-semester course starts with students being assigned teams and clients and brainstorming ideas, while the second semester is used to focus on prototyping and testing the devices before presenting a final design. The program is overseen by mechanical engineering professors Megan Conrad and Nassif Rayess, as well as nursing professor Molly McClelland.
In addition to the student team that formed to work with Dries, there were two others for clients Bobbi Stevens and Mefi Barrera, who both have post-polio syndrome, a group of potentially disabling signs and symptoms that appear 30 to 40 years after an initial polio infection.
Dries said that he became involved in the program due to the suggestion of McClelland, who’s also a member of Dries’ place of worship, Doxa Church in Rochester Hills.
Dries said he has enjoyed working with his team throughout the school year, which includes Bachi, Mati, mechanical engineering students Jezelle Manni, Andy Trupiano and Zane Hitch.
“They’re very smart, creative and represent the university well,” he said. “They’re so nice and polite, very easy to get along with.”
Bachi said he and his teammates already knew each other, which made it easy to work together to find the right product for Dries. After visiting Dries at his Rochester Hills home and seeing the grabbing devices he uses, the team knew they wanted to make a tool that wasn’t available on the market, Bachi said.
Dries said his existing grabber tools have limited capabilities or would break.
“Nothing out there worked, they all had limited things,” he said.
After coming up with about 100 ideas, the team settled on making an all-in-one device, Bachi said. They also wanted to make sure the tool was lightweight for Dries.
“We decided to get carbon fiber tubing for the body of the tool itself that allows the highest strength/weight ratio, which will essentially ensure that he gets the strongest tool without worrying about weight,” Bachi said during the presentation.
As Richard’s design team gets ready to graduate next month, the students want to see their work continue next year with a new group of seniors. The team wants to develop a student-run nonprofit so future students can continue to develop on ideas and help others in need, Trupiano said.
“That’s going to be in the hands of the faculty here in terms of what they decide to do, but we’re trying to leave them a framework where if somebody sees the potential in this and somebody has the desire, we want to give them everything they can do that,” he said. “Both us and the faculty are really happy with this design, so the goal is definitely to pass this on to students after us.”
Meanwhile, Dries’ son, Marc Milam, who also attended Monday’s event, is impressed with the finished product. As a former Computer-Aided Design (CAD) engineer, he’s glad that students had the opportunity to work on a project that took them through the steps of what a company would do to develop a product.
“It was really neat to see all that in a package,” Milam said. “It’s nice to see their enthusiasm, the love for what they do, the time and effort that they put into it.”