UConn Students Fix Power Chair for Tolland Resident

Tolland resident Annalee Hughes will be able to have a lot more fun this summer, thanks to UConn biomedical engineering students Stephen Elovetsky and Steven Rogers, who fixed up her all-terrain power chair as part of their senior project.

Annalee's mother, Susan Lucek, said that the repairs will allow her daughter to travel much more independently, whether she feels like checking out the backyard or going over the hill to see her family's chickens.

"The chair kind of opens up a whole new world for her, because it can go over rough ground," she said, adding that even the muddy spring ground can't hold back Annalee when her chair is functioning properly. "It opens up that whole part of our property that without it, she can't really access."

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Annalee, a student at , originally received the wheelchair in 2010 as part of another UConn undergraduate project. Lucek said that she contacted biomedical engineering professor John Enderle after both reading about how a senior project had assisted another local resident and after hearing about the program from a co-worker and UConn graduate.

Enderle's students took on the all-terrain chair project and ended up building it for less than $1,500 and giving it to the family, Lucek said. She added that a similar chair retails for around $35,000.

Enderle said that the biomedical engineering department has been working with families like Annalee's since the late 1980s. 

"People of all walks of life come to us with projects," he said. "The students are getting hands on experience with problems that make a difference."

But recently, the original chair has been malfunctioning; the leveling mechanism was not running smoothly, and the chair would continue moving an extra ten inches or so after Annalee stopped pushing the joystick.

Rogers and Elovetsky decided to take on Annalee's wheelchair, as well as two other projects. To get the chair functioning properly, they programmed a microcontroller to fix the auto-level mechanism on her seat. They also placed two accelerometers on the frame and seat of the chair to maintain a consistent level for Annalee, according to their project description.

Enderle said that each team received $1,000 from the School of Engineering to fund their projects this year.

Lucek said that she hopes other families will be able to work with the school to continue its good work: providing essential and often expensive services for local families while teaching tomorrow's biomedical engineers the skills that they need.

"I think there are a lot of people who might be able to benefit from this," she said.

Check out a list of the senior projects at the UConn School of Engineering website.