Leckey - helping disabled children (pedal) walk better
A mobile and web application that adds real-time interactivity and reporting to a child's pedal walker experience.
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Challenge
Leckey are a design and manufacturing company that create mobility products for children with specialist needs walk. Instil was hired to develop a connected web and mobile application to compliment their MyWay Pedal Walker.
‘MyWay Pedal Walker’ is a product designed to help disabled children to ‘walk’ (pedal) in an upright position, working their lower limb muscles in the range of movement the child would use during stepping and other functional activities. This movement enables:
- Targeted strengthening of lower limb muscles
- Cardio-respiratory fitness from aerobic exercise
- Maintenance / Improved bone strength
- Rehab from treatments and surgery
- Promotes flexibility and circulation
Project Goals
Leckey approached Instil to help them realise a digital platform that would:
- Motivate and engage children to use the pedal walker
- Enable parents and therapists to get real-time feedback on distance, speed and duration of pedalling
- Build up a historic picture of of session data and progress to enable analysis to help with treatment and research
As such the platform needed to provide the following capabilities:
- Child and Therapist Account Management
- Training and test Sessions
- Real-time distance, speed and duration
- Historic reporting and analysis
In addition, pedal walkers are in effect medical devices, and for this reason both the software and hardware had to pass stringent medical software compliance checks.
Approach
The software consisted of 3 main components:
- An engaging, child-friendly Android application used by a child and their therapist to help them achieve specific goals. The app communicates and receives events from a bespoke hardware sensor attached to the walker
- A backend API to register and manage all walker therapy sessions, including handling all sensor events
- And a web application used by therapists to interpret and report on the progress of each child, across all their sessions.
The entire backend and mobile application was written in Kotlin, with an Angular UI (this was just before we all fell in love with React.. .
Outcomes
The pedal walker application was in many ways a grand experiment - Leckey's first attempt at enhancing a child's experience of using a pedal walker. Developed on a minimal budget, the application proved out the importance of digitising the walking experience for both kids and therapists.