This excerpt was edited and compressed by Roger E. Kaufman from the full broadcast production shown on American Broadcasting Company television stations around the country as part of the Jerry Lewis Telethon.

 

This clip was taken from the 1976 Cerebral Palsy National Telethon. When my students and I were building those devices I was the duPont Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at M.I.T. Among other things, the film shows me (with hair, no less) and my student, Diane Chambers working with a device she built under my direction called "Magic Mice". It also shows some of the other therapy devices designed and built by my other students.

The photos below show Diane demonstrating her eye-hand coordination training device, "Magic Mice", along with an "under the hood" view

Here you see me with another of my old undergraduate students, Dennis Burke, working on some devices Dennis built for teaching spelling and eye-hand coordination. (Dennis went on to become a prominent orthopedic surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital and then at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital. You may have seen his photo on the front page of your paper when Dennis was flown to Geneva Switzerland on a big military transport to bring back his patient, Secretary of State John Kerry, when Kerry fractured his right femur in a bicycling accident .)

This shows one of the patients working with Dennis and me using Dennis' alphabet trainer. The blocks each are coded so they must be properly oriented and placed to get the reward:

*Dennis W. Burke, MD, is now an orthopedic surgeon at the Massachusetts General Hospital, specializing in total joint replacement.

These are some patients working with devices built by one of my freshman students, Mindy Lipson.


Figure 7.

*Mindy Lipson Aisen, MD, is now a board-certified neurologist and Director of the Rehabilitation Research and Development Service of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. She developed the device "Magic Light Pen" shown above.


The "commercial" prototype of Magic Light Pen developed at Goodwill Industries, Inc., Harrisburg Pennsylvania.

Here is a challenging dynamic eye-hand trainer built by a senior that enhances forground/background discrimination and motion planning.

This is a student, Mindy Lipson, trying out an electronic eye-hand coordination training game I personally designed and built.

Here you see me with another of my old undergraduate students, Dennis Burke, working with one of the patients at Kennedy Memorial Hospital. The photo shows a device that I built for training eye-hand coordination.

The article "Engineering design education and rehabilitation engineering" by the late Robert W. Mann, ScD, Whitaker Professor Emeritus, Biomedical Engineering
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, gives an excellent discussion of the history of this project, together with Professor Mann's innumerable other contributions to these areas. Professor Mann was a brilliant professor and a wonderful friend whose seminal contributions practically gave birth to the fields of rehabilitation engineering, modern engineering design education, and computer-aided design.

Here is article about this project which appeared in the Boston Herald Advertiser's Sunday magazine section:

Return to Roger E. Kaufman Homepage