Father creates balance treatment device for daughter

Born three months premature, Mackenzie Maher was diagnosed with severe spastic quadriplegia cerebral palsy and given a prognosis of a life impacted by severe disabilities. Never wanting to accept the dire prognosis of their daughter, Kevin Maher and his wife Rhonda became fully invested in doing all they could by providing Mackenzie with an intensive daily at-home therapy program.

When their daughter was only 4, The Mahers were told that her very poor balance would benefit by adding vestibular stimulation to her therapy program. In practicality, it was impossible for Mackenzie to perform any of the exercises on her own, so the parents had to provide the therapy for her. After giving it her all for a couple of weeks, the therapy was discontinued because administering it manually proved to be just too difficult.

Determined to find a practical way for providing safe vestibular therapy for his daughter, Kevin applied his 20 years of experience with robotics systems towards engineering a solution. He created a rotational chair in his garage made of a child's car seat, scraps of wood, and various hardware. Within weeks of using the rotational device, Mackenzie was making extraordinary and unexpected gains not only with balance, but also in her overall development. Encouraged by her gains, Kevin bootstrapped his way to producing the first automated GyroStim in 2007.

Nowadays, GyroStim is a computer-controlled, automated, multi-axis rotational chair. It provides therapeutic treatment for balance disorders resulting from injury, illness, and neurological or aging-related conditions. The treatment is uniquely capable of reducing or eliminating dizziness, imbalance, nausea, headache, fatigue, brain fog, memory loss, depression, anxiety, and other manifestations of balance disorders and vestibular dysfunction.

This story was adapted from: https://www.gyrostim.com/history and https://www.mbtmag.com/best-practices/news/22392881/father-invents-balan...

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