Man adapts PlayStation controller for boy with cerebral palsy

Peter Byrne was 21 years old when he wrote PlayStation an email. Peter had been a PlayStation gamer since he was 8 years old and he never had problems with the controllers. But this changed with the PlayStation 4 control pad. Because of his condition, his left hand was hitting the large touchpad in the centre of the controller, which was constantly pausing the game. So Peter wrote PlayStation an e-mail, to see if there was something the console manufacturer could do about this issue.

He got a reply from Alex Nawabi, a retail marketer at the company, who got in touch. The PlayStation employee told the gamer he was going to work on a solution and that he was taking this matter personally, not on behalf of PlayStation.

After 10 hours of work, Alex managed to reverse engineer a PS4 controller, unwire the touchpad and rewire the button to the back of the controller. The PlayStation employee sent Peter the modified controller, explaining the changes he had done and asking Peter to tell him if he needed any other modifications.

“The email you sent definitely struck a chord within. It killed me to hear how something you used to thoroughly enjoy was being ruined because of our controller design”, Alex wrote in the letter that he shipped along the gadget.

The solution was perfect for Peter. “Mr Nawabi really cared about my situation and did this on his own time to make my experience better. I honestly can’t thank him enough for everything he did for me”, he said.

Adapted from: https://bit.ly/1SNjORZ