Page 30 - Mobility Management, March 2020

Quokka Car Seat: Specialized Positioning for Kids in Casts
While addressing hip dysplasia in young children is crucial, spica casting creates new challenges for patients and families, including how to safely transport a casted child home from the hospital.
Some hospitals offer loaner car seats, but they usually require rolling up towels and stuffing them into the seat to prop up the child. Car seats aren’t crash tested with this makeshift positioning in place, and since kids can remain in casts for months, families are forced to roll up towels each time the child is in the car.
Enter the Quokka, Convaid’s new car seat that fits children today while they’re spica casted, and afterward, once their casts are off.
A Positioning Demand with Few Answers
The Quokka — named after an adorably photogenic Australian marsupial — isn’t the first time Etac, Convaid’s parent company, has developed a car seat for kids
in casts. Etac also owns R82, which previously sold the Hippo, a car seat that could accommodate casted kids. When the Hippo went off the market, Convaid looked into creating a new car seat that could serve these kids and improve on what had come before.
Laina Brock, Global Product Manager for Convaid, said the Convaid team saw a definite need for a car seat that accommodated casts. “The ones on the market were very cumbersome and hard to use, very heavy,” she said. “It was making what was already hard — a surgery on a kid that’s going to be put into a cast — even harder because now you don’t know if you can safely transport them back home.”
Car seat policies also complicate matters. “A lot of laws are being passed that a child under 2 years of age has to be in a reverse-facing car seat unless they outweigh everything on the market, and that’s hard because there’s such a small number of car seats that allow for a kid in a cast,” Brock said. “Yes, my kid is too big for the casted car seats, but they’re not too big
for the normal car seats. But I don’t want to transport them [in a regular car seat] because it’s not ready for a casted kid. But under the law, that car seat still has to be used.”
28 MARCH 2020 | MOBILITY MANAGEMENT
Quokka’s Quintessential Qualities
Along with the car seat itself — Convaid chose a smaller, shorter shell for a more compact footprint — the Quokka system includes modular triangular wedges that can
be configured into larger triangles or cubes as needed for the best fit. “The safety of the child in the car seat increases as more of the kid’s surface area is touching the car seat,” Brock explained. “If you’re in a wreck, how little will this kid move? That’s what the wedge system does: When legs are casted at a certain angle, they can’t be put all the way back into that seat. The wedge creates a 45° angle where their whole backside can be in contact with that seat. You can rearrange the wedge in whatever way you need. It’s all about getting greater surface area contact.”
To accommodate kids of varying ages and sizes, Quokka can be used forward or rear facing. “I think the Quokka came out at a really good time, just as doctors are starting to cast at younger and younger [patient] ages,” Brock noted. “The need for smaller car seats with a really low weight capacity, which the Quokka
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