Comfort adaptation for child potty training
Being comfortable is always desirable.
However, when you are a parent and trying to potty train your child, the comfort of the child becomes essential to the successful outcome.
Whilst the majority of children’s potty seats are made from rigid materials, the pain experienced by the client’s daughter during potty training meant that none of the commercial products were comfortable enough.
The Challenge
The client has cerebral palsy and is unable to sit on hard surfaces due to pain from the metalwork which remains in her legs following a recent hip operation.
The client’s mother would like to start potty training her daughter but is unable to do so as all of the suitable potties use hard surfaces for the seating area and are too painful for her daughter to use.
The client had sourced two potties, one of which was an orthopaedic chair which she planned to use at home and the other was a commercial potty which she planned to use at the grandparents house.
As was expected, there was no comfort upgrade available for the commercial potty and, whilst the manufacturer of the orthopaedic chair did offer a comfort adaptation, it was felt that this would not be suitable due to the lack of pommel.
The solution
Initial thoughts were to design a potty seat that could be 3d printed from a flexible material such as TPU. This would use a sparse infill pattern so that the resulting part was as soft as possible.
Trial profiles were made to checkout the suitability and feel of the end product but it soon became apparent that the resulting part was unlikely to provide the level of comfort required.
The next thought was to create a 3d printed mould that could be used to form the potty seat using a two part silicone material.
A mould representing a cross section of the potty seat was designed and 3d printed in PLA plastic.
The first trial mould used a solid section of 30A shore hardness silicone.
Whilst this was reasonably soft to the touch the mother thought that it would still be too firm and might still be uncomfortable for her daughter to sit on.
The next part of the solution was to create lots of regularly spaced air holes, which would effectively reduce the firmness of the seat.
Again, we were moving in the right direction but felt we could do better.
The next trial mould still incorporated the round air holes but this time used used a much softer 10A silicone which again improved the feel.
The final iteration of the trail part was to further reduce the volume of silicone used and thus increase the air volume by changing from round air holes to hexagonal holes. The result resembles a honeycomb, which is nature’s way of packing the maximum amount of something into the smallest space.
The next phase of development was to create a full size mould of the potty seat which comprised two parts; the lower part being the top surface profile of the potty seat and the upper part being the profile required to create the honeycomb air pockets.
The resulting soft silicone spotty seat was supplied to the client for trails on both the orthopedic seat and commercial potty.
Whilst the mother was happy that the surface of the seat was soft enough, the lack of pommel lead to her daughter’s legs rotating inwards so it was decided to add a pommel for version 2 of the seat.
For sizing, we decided to match the dimensions of the pommel used on a commercial potty seat but after trials of the version 2 seat it was decided to significantly reduce the width of the pommel to prevent over-separation of the legs.
Version 3 of the seat was created, again using a two-part mould set that was printed in PLA plastic from the 3d model of the potty.
Two sets of this design were created, one for each of the two client’s potties.
The benefit
The creation of these soft potty seats has allowed the mother to start potty training her daughter without the pain that resulted from the use of the previous hard potty seats.
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