Sacramento State electrical engineering professor Warren Drew Smith has helped create a device that helps detect falls in young cerebral palsy patients and potentially many other patients who have trouble walking.

Smith said the device, known as a fall monitor, was created with the intent to accurately detect how a child with cerebral palsy walks so that the doctors may provide treatment to help.

“The patent shows ways we have developed to use this monitor to analyze how active the child is every minute of the day,” said Smith. “In addition, if the child falls down, the method we’ve developed allows us to detect if the child has fallen down, when and how severe the fall was, what was the child’s body orientation if the child fell forward or on his or her back or side. That info gets saved away in this monitor.”

Smith, who has a background in biomedical engineering, collaborated with his colleague Anita Bagley, the co-director of the Motion Analysis Laboratory at Shriners Hospital for Children, Northern California. The device was created so it could accurately detect the patient’s movements.

“There are eight video cameras that are recording the child,” said Smith. “(The doctors) put wires in the legs to report muscle activity. It’s very fancy and very nice, but the child, in this laboratory setting surrounded by all the doctors and the clinical people, walks in a different way than the child does at home. Even though this is a great laboratory, they don’t really get a sense of how the child is doing at home and at school during everyday living.”

The road to creating this special device was not always the easiest, but with enough patience through the years, the fall monitor’s patent was approved this year, Smith said.

“We wanted to get started in 2005,” said Smith. “We submitted a research proposal to the Shriners and got approval in 2006, so we were able to start at that time. We worked for three years and then after that, we continued to collect more data after that. It’s added up to several years. Finally, the patent was approved on April 10, 2012.”

Steve Archer, a former student of Smith’s in the late 1980s, said he looks forward to what his former professor’s device can do since it could not only help people with cerebral palsy, but other patients who have issues with walking.

“It looks like it will be a useful tool for doctors to help a certain population of patients,” said Archer. “With that device, it seems like you can learn many things about a person’s condition that you could not learn in any other way. That might be true for cerebral palsy as well as other indications, possibly including epilepsy or motion disorders.”

Archer, who is now the senior director of electrical development at Neuropace, remembers Smith as an instructor who emphasized the importance of the fundamentals in engineering.

“(He didn’t teach you how to) necessarily think quick, but really take everything that you learn and try and understand it from a fundamental principal,” said Archer. “Don’t just understand that pushing the red button turns it on, but what that push is causing to happen and whatever action is taking place. You would have to understand principles of that phenomenon. Memorization would do you little good in his class and you would have to know what the next step will be.

Seetha Sathymoorthy, another former student of Smith’s well as his student assistant in 2006, said working with Smith felt like a real job because he challenged his students in order to learn the material, especially when she assisted in the creation of the fall monitor for her master thesis.

“He keeps track of your work record and motivates you to make progress,” Sathymoorthy said. “When I face a problem or difficulties in a project, he doesn’t give the answer right away, but guides us to think to find the right solution. In short, working with Dr. Smith gave the confidence and practical skills to work as an engineer in real world.”

A hard working instructor and engineer, Smith is passionate about not only his projects, but about his students as well, said Archer as he remembers the gift Smith gave him on his graduation day.

“I remember he gave me a book of paper airplanes when he graduated. It was this book that taught you how to make paper B2 bombers,” said Archer. “I thought it was really nice of him to do because I really liked airplanes. It was really thoughtful of him to do that.”

Smith said the fall monitor is one of the things engineers are capable of.

“(This) is what we engineers can do; this is a complete computer,” said Smith. “There are sensors and input. It has memory, so all the data can be stored in there. It has output, so we can send our data to a PC. Dr. Bagley said we can measure these things in a home setting and we can make these things and the child can wear it.”

Camille Anglo can be reached at [email protected]