Kettering University

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Switching to lollipops

By Dawn Hibbard

It is one of those things many of us take for granted – turning on the lights when we walk into a room, flipping on the radio or the blender, but for children with disabilities that impair dexterity, these are challenging tasks.

Enter a team of Kettering students from Dr. Henry Kowalski’s Experimental Mechanics class. Armed with four and half years of engineering education, they took on the challenge of making electrical toys and common household appliances more accessible to handicapped children enrolled at Webb Elementary School in Hazel Park, Mich.

“Children with disabilities do not have the manual dexterity necessary to use common household switches,” said Monica Denis, a senior Mechanical and Industrial Engineering major from Clarkston, Mich. “And toys that are adapted for these children are often very expensive,” she added. Denis and fellow students Shana Paciocco, Beau Jewell, Heather Kaler and Eric Adams took typical toys and retrofitted them with modified lollipop switches.

Lollipop switches, which look just like they sound—large and round and flat—normally require constant pressure to remain active, so the group modified them to include a relay with two inputs, one for “on” and one for “off.”

In analyzing the range of switches available, the group tried a variety of switch styles. “The biggest hurdle for us as a group was to find what kind of button would work best,” Denis said. “We ordered ‘lollipop’ switches that would work well because they were large and very sensitive to touch, but the switch was a momentary switch and would not keep the object turned on,” she added.

The group also tried a button found on a typical piece of manufacturing machinery. This button had more resistance but once it was pushed the object would stay on. They also tried using a typical light dimmer switch. They found the dimmers were easy to push and would stay turned on or off, but the button was smaller, which increased difficulty for handicapped users.

“We decided to modify the dimmer switch by removing the dimming application and adding a larger top to the switch,” said Denis, adding “we used larger lids from food containers, such as the lid off of an animal crackers container. We manufactured a larger base for the new larger button and mounted the electrical parts inside of the new base.”  

The toys they adapted with modified lollipop switches included a rotating disco ball with different colored flashing lights and a mechanized butterfly with optic fiber wings that lit up, changed color and moved. “We tried to find toys that would ‘do’ something and keep their attention to help facilitate mental development,” Denis said.

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