u/require-macro

My daughter is special needs, having genetic disorder 1Q21.1 duplication syndrome. One of the quirks of this disorder is she’d like to run around while eating. This leads to risks of choking, risk of impaling her mouth roof/cheeks/gums, poor diet as she can essentially pick through what she wants and skip eating anything good for herself, and a degraded hygiene for her and anyone else in the house as food tends to get in carpet, furniture, and anywhere else it can be dropped or kicked.

I’m a career fabricator with 20+ years in fabrication. Looking for solutions, the only one realistically on the market is the safety harnesses made for vehicles for special needs. They are somewhat expensive, often turned down by insurance, and using them during meals would require them be washed for hygiene which would degrade their performance and safety factor. Not to mention figuring out a mount point for them anyways on a dining chair. I had to come up with a solution that could be easily iterated on, repaired easily and replaced easily without costing a fortune. My solution and voyage into 3D printing was this.

It’s printed in ASA, 100% infill, 13 hour print time give or take and printed on an Ender 3 v3 KE. Modeled in Freecad. I’m already on a version 5 as I fine tune the design so works a little more seamlessly.

This buckle has allowed us to get her to the point in one week where she’s actively wanting to sit and buckle to eat, eats her whole meal, lets us know when she’s done and has reduced mess and waste by a 80-90% margin.

Hello, everyone.

My daughter (6 y/o) has had issues with meal times for roughly two years now. She’s non-verbal 1Q21.1 duplication. She has loved eating and trying new foods, once her mother got her to branch from her safe foods. The issue is she will absolutely wear any food she touches from head to toe, especially her salads, bbq, or any treat foods like ramen (not the instant ramen). For the past couple of years she’s insisted on walking around while trying to eat, or running and taunting with her food playfully which causes a big mess when she’s hyper.

This left us at the dilemma when using a harness to keep her seated she would’ve absolutely destroyed her harness so I had to figure something out. One thought I had was when buckled up either in the car or the wonderfold that she doesn’t fight her seat belt. So I designed and made some mounts and turned one of our kitchen chairs into a seat-belted (is that a word?) chair. She took to it well and so far today has just sat and ate. When she was done, she’d let us know.

A question for the community. How have any of you that had this issue with your child broke the running/walking/moving with food around the home issue? I’m open to more long term solutions to helping her be better regulated in this regard. She attends ABA, Feeding and Speech therapy as of now.

Thank you!