Page 12 - Mobility Management, September/October 2022

ATP Series
Somewhere to Go
Providing Crucial Sensory Input
For other consumers, dynamic seating provides helpful sensory input. While parents and teachers have long admon- ished children to “Sit still and pay atten- tion,” today’s classrooms are more likely to embrace movement while learning.
“If you look at school districts that
have an understanding of that need for movement, you’ll see that children will have fidget [toys], they’ll be sitting on cushions that allow movement, they’ll be allowed to stand up if they can stand up,” Pedersen said. “They’re allowed to do that. A lot of school chairs have tennis balls on their feet that allow a child to slide back and forth. There are rubber bands put underneath the children’s feet so they can push on those.
“I think that the occupational thera- pists that have incorporated that into the school systems have seen success, and
the teachers have been thankful that they found something for their students. So now let’s incorporate that for children that aren’t in regular school desks and don’t have the ability to stand up and move. Let’s incorporate that into their wheel- chairs. I think that’s where we’re coming into play, to say that we want to allow that type of movement as well.”
That ability to move is crucial for some wheelchair clients to optimally function.
“There are people who seek out movement,” Lange said. “There’s a group of people that could represent a lot of different diagnoses who just need to rock. And if they rock, they’re more alert and engaged. If you block that need, you get someone who either gets very agitated or perhaps shuts down.”
She described a client “who was spending most of her day at school [with her head down]. And she just looked like she was asleep all the time. But Mom said
at home, she sat in a standard rocking chair, and she would just rock all day long and her head would be up and her eyes would be open. But at school she couldn’t rock. So she just looked like she was asleep. She wasn’t. She was just really withdrawn, really shut down.”
Lange and the seating team added dynamic seating to the girl’s wheelchair. “We had to move it for her to show her, because she had been in a static wheel- chair for so long. And she finally started moving a little and realized, ‘Hey, I can move.’ She still had some times, probably when she was not happy with whatever they were doing in the classroom, that
she would [keep her head down]. But
she was spending much more time alert and using her communication device and participating because she could move. She needed that sensory simulation so much.”
If dynamic seating isn’t provided, Lange added, clients will try hard to move on
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