Robotics Team Joins Santo Domingo Mission

 

18-MEMBER ROBOTICS TEAM TO JOIN IMAHELPS MISSION TO SANTO DOMINGO

by Jeff Crider, June 2024

 

JonDarr Bradshaw, a robotics mentor from the Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland, Ohio, celebrates the delivery of 7-year-old Ariana Simbaña's mechanical hand, which robotics students provided to her during the IMAHelps mission to Quito, Ecuador.

Photo courtesy of Jeff Crider, IMAHelps

Our summer mission to Santo Domingo will include an inner city high school robotics team from Cleveland, Ohio with 11 students and 7 adult mentors and chaperones.

“The students are very excited to join the mission and see how they can use their robotics skills to change children’s lives,” said JonDarr V.T. Bradshaw, a retired military aviator and NASA educator who oversees the robotics program at the Great Lakes Science Center as its community engagement coordinator.

The students focus on designing and fabricating low-cost mechanical arms and hands for child amputees using 3-D printers. The students like to focus on child amputees of families with limited means as they often cannot afford prosthetics of any kind while they are still growing. However, the students have made mechanical arms for adult patients, too.

IMAHelps has already identified four adult patients for robotics team, three of whom suffered amputations of both arms in electrocution accidents.

IMAHelps is also collaborating with a nonprofit prosthetics organization in Santo Domingo called Rehabilitación, which launched a social media campaign in late June to help identify prospective child amputees for the robotics team. IMAHelps and Rehabilitacion are focusing on finding child amputees with below elbow amputations as those are the types of amputations that the robotics team can best accommodate with their mechanical arms and hands.

 

IMAHelps has been collaborating with Bradshaw and his team of inner city robotics students for the past three years.

The collaboration began after IMAHelps volunteers met a 13-year-old Samantha Chiluisa during a medical mission planning trip to Quito, Ecuador in late March of 2022. Samantha had lost her left arm and the ability to use her right arm in a bus crash. IMAHelps, at that time, had no solution to offer Samantha.

But two weeks after meeting her, IMAHelps founder Ines Allen and Vice President Jeff Crider met Bradshaw on a Zoom call organized by the Rotary E-Club of World Peace, which had invited Allen and Crider to make a presentation to the club about IMAHelps’ humanitarian medical mission work. After hearing about IMAHelps’ prosthetics work, Bradshaw said he was mentoring a team of high school robotics students who had an interest in humanitarian projects. He said his students had the ability to produce mechanical arms and hands. He asked if there would be a possibility for his students to collaborate with IMAHelps.

Crider and Allen then shared Samantha’s story and her dream of being able to write again. The rest, as they say, is history. Crider and Bradshaw followed up with each other with multiple phone calls, with Crider providing Samantha’s measurements, which were relayed to him by Samantha’s family. Crider later traveled to Cleveland to meet Bradshaw and the robotics team and to pick up their initial prosthesis for Samantha, which he personally delivered to Samantha in October of 2022 along with other IMAHelps volunteers. The robotics team is continuing to make changes and refinements to their initial designs with Samantha’s suggestions. Crider plans to return to Ecuador to deliver the robotics team’s latest prosthetics for Samantha and two other patients during a return trip later this year or early next year.

This summer’s robotics team will include Daniela Moreno, a Cleveland student of Ecuadorian descent who rallied students from four rival high schools in Cleveland to work together to create a mechanical arm for Samantha. Other robotics team members include the two students who joined the IMAHelps mission to Quito, Ecuador last summer — Yariselle Andujar of Davis Aerospace and Maritime High School. Gabriel Leonard. Leonard, currently a student at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona, Florida, is returning as an adult mentor to help mentor the robotics team.

The students will be working on alternating shifts, splitting their time between working with prosthetics patients and helping the IMAHelps triage team.