In the hallway outside Dr. Erkan Kaplanoglu’s lab at UTC, two-year-old Amelia Aiken put her hands on the pink wheels of her new mobility chair and started moving forward.
She took to it almost immediately. The smile on her face said it all.
For her mother, Kyndal Aiken, the moment meant a lot.
“Yeah, it’s very rewarding. It’s very exciting. You can’t anticipate what her reaction is going to be,” Aiken said about the July 30 introduction of Amelia to the chair built in Kaplanoglu’s Biomechatronic and Assistive Technology Lab in UTC’s College of Engineering and Computer Science. “You hope she’s going to respond to it well, but there’s nothing that I can make her do. So it’s very exciting to see her take right to it.”
That moment had been building for months.
In early April, Aiken sent an email to the College of Engineering and Computer Science asking whether anyone might be willing to help. Her daughter, who has cerebral palsy, needed a mobility device that could help her move more independently.
Aiken had learned about a 3D-printed Toddler Mobility Trainer, a child-sized mobility chair designed to help young children explore and move on their own. The family had already applied for one through an existing maker network, but after waiting a couple of months, no one had picked up the request.
So she reached out to UTC.
In the email, she asked whether UTC students might be willing to take on the project so Amelia could begin learning to use the chair before starting preschool.
Amelia was unable to breathe at birth and was later diagnosed with cerebral palsy, which affects her entire body. Her mother said Amelia’s biggest long-term challenge is mobility—being able to access things on her own.
Kaplanoglu, department head and professor of engineering management and technology, did what he often does when a health-related request reaches campus.
He said yes.
Then he handed the project to mechatronics major Austin McDade.
McDade, a rising junior from Ringgold, Georgia, serves as president of UTC’s Mechatronics Club and lab manager for the Biomechatronic and Assistive Technology Lab. He also has experience in biomechatronics research and 3D printing, both on campus and at home.
“I was in here one day and Dr. K said that we’ve got a walker project,” McDade said, “and he told me this one’s going to be a 3D-printable wheelchair.”
McDade joined Kaplanoglu’s lab during his freshman year and has since worked on hand-related projects, battle bots and a radio-controlled car of his own design.
This was the second time he had worked on a mobility device to help a child.
The first involved a young boy named Jack and centered on a walker rather than a chair. McDade said that earlier experience helped show him how much a mobility device can affect a child’s daily life.
“It’s a wonderful thing to help someone because it can make such an impact, especially early on in life,” McDade said during an interview while the chair was still being printed. “For a 2-year-old to be able to move around and perhaps to see something on the other side of the room and to be able to get herself to the other side of the room to see that object or to look at it, that’s going to be really helpful for a child.”
Kaplanoglu said that kind of work is exactly what he wants students doing.
“When they start working here, I call them the research team and team members,” Kaplanoglu said. “There’s no, ‘He’s a professor, he’s a student.’ No. We are the whole research team.”
That approach shaped this project from the beginning. Kaplanoglu let McDade lead the work and communicate directly with the family.
He said that is typical of how his lab operates, especially when the request involves healthcare.
“I usually say yes and then find a way to solve it,” Kaplanoglu said. “If we say yes, we have to do it.”
Dr. Kumar Yelamarthi, dean of UTC’s College of Engineering and Computer Science, said the project reflects the kind of work the college wants students to do.
“At UTC CECS, we ask our students to use their talents not only to innovate, but to serve,” Yelamarthi said. “Amelia’s mobility chair is an example of what happens when technical expertise meets community need. I am proud of our students and faculty and grateful to our community for trusting us with challenges that matter.”
From there, McDade got to work, and the chair was built with Amelia in mind from the beginning.
For anyone outside the world of 3D printing, that process is far more involved than it sounds.
McDade ordered filament, downloaded the design files and began the long process of turning a digital model into a physical chair sized for a toddler.
The files were downloaded from the open-source website MakerWorld and were originally designed through the Toddler Mobility Trainer project at 3D-Mobility. UTC did not design the files but used them to print and assemble Amelia’s chair.
The chair is designed for indoor use under adult supervision.
McDade said the work starts with STL files, a type of design file that has to be prepared in slicing software before a printer can use it. The software lets the user set how each part will be printed, including wall thickness and infill density, which affects both strength and material use.
Then the printing starts, piece by piece.
McDade said he chose ABS plastic, the same material used in Lego bricks, because it offers more strength and better heat resistance than PLA, another common 3D-printing material.
Aiken asked for a pink color scheme, so the device was produced in different shades of pink, with white wheels and pink thermoplastic polyurethane used to give the wheels grip.
Since Amelia’s chair includes larger structural parts, many of the print jobs took a long time.
“Anywhere from eight to 18 hours,” McDade said.
Some smaller parts could be printed together on the same printer bed. Larger parts had to be done one at a time. After printing, the pieces were assembled using a combination of interlocking connections, glue and plastic welding.
Safety drove the process, and Kaplanoglu explained that designing assistive devices for children requires a different level of care than designing for adults.
“It’s a big challenge because of disabilities and also because of the age,” he said. “You have to be careful about size, weight, how heavy or light it should be, and also noise because we don’t want to put in something very noisy and then distract or affect the kids. And also, while you’re working with kids, you have to double your safety requirements.”
McDade said the design relies on carefully engineered parts that fit together in dovetailed channels. In some places, the fit is tight enough that little reinforcement is needed. In others, glue or plastic welding adds extra support.
“There are a lot of different ways you can go about bonding these together and making sure it won’t fall apart,” he said.
The family—Kyndal, her husband, Kenton, and Amelia’s younger brother, Barrett—visited UTC to pick up the mobility device on the way to physical therapy.
For Aiken, watching Amelia use the chair for the first time brought immediate relief.
“It shows that it’s a good design. It’s very intuitive,” she said. “She can go right to the wheels and start pushing and propelling herself without anyone teaching her how to do it.”
That matters because Amelia is going to need a wheelchair throughout her life, Aiken said, and this is her first.
The new chair, she said, “is giving her access to her peers’ level. Instead of being in a stroller or in a wagon, she’s actually on her peers’ level. And so she’s going to be able to go around school in it. She’s going to be able to pull up to a desk in it.”
Amelia turns 3 in November and is preparing for preschool. Her mother said the chair should help her begin getting used to moving through those spaces more independently.
“Independence and autonomy, absolutely,” Aiken said. “It’s great that she gets to start practicing at this age because she is going to need to wheel herself over the course of her life as well.”
Aiken said the family is already thinking about how to use the chair in everyday routines, at home, at the store and eventually at school.
“We’re going to start using a desk she can roll up to at home,” she said. “We’re going to start practicing color. Well, she already knows a lot of her colors, the color matching, number counting, those preschool skills. So this is going to help her feel acclimated before she has to jump into school.”
For McDade, seeing Amelia take to the chair made the work feel real.
“It’s really amazing,” he said. “There’s a lot of work that went into this, obviously. Most of it was done by the 3D printers, but there were a lot of technical things to sort through; once we got it all, it was just really great to see her smile and roll across the floor. Now she can move on into her life to the next stage, and that’s really wonderful to see.”
Aiken said the experience of working with Kaplanoglu and McDade was positive from start to finish.
“They’ve been very open. They’ve been collaborative,” she said. “They let us choose the colors that we wanted and updated us along the way. They kept us in the loop of how things were going. We couldn’t be happier working with them.”
She said Amelia has always brought joy to people around her and is beginning to show more and more of her personality.
“She deserves the world,” Aiken said. “And she teaches us to slow down and appreciate life and to be grateful for little things.”
Now, with Amelia’s first mobility chair ready to become part of daily life, Aiken is already thinking about what comes next, not just for her daughter but for other families.
After first looking into how to get Amelia a chair, Aiken began exploring 3D printing herself. She said she is now working toward becoming a maker in the Chattanooga area so she can help print similar chairs for other children.
“We make toys for her now. A lot of Montessori stuff, stacking rings, roller ball towers,” she said. “When we got this idea for Amelia, I started looking at access to a printer. I was thinking if we had a printer, then we could print it forward for other kids that need a chair like this in Chattanooga. I’m not there yet, but I’m practicing.”
Photos by Angela Foster, courtesy UTC