Amazing brace

An odd-looking contraption sits in a windowless room at the Alberta Children’s Hospital in Calgary.

The Risser table, one of only a handful in Canada, looks like playground toy, with its tubular steel frame and cross members of metal and wood.

But the device improves the lives of hundreds of southern Alberta children every year.

Orthotists use the table to wrap a child’s torso with plaster to form a body cast needed to create braces that straighten spines affected by scoliosis, a medical condition in which a person's spine is curved from side to side.

The Risser table is just one piece of technology used by certified orthotists and orthotic technicians within Alberta Health Services. They use it to build, from scratch, custom-made braces and prosthetics that support or correct musculoskeletal deformities and abnormalities. The braces help increase or maintain range of motion in joints and improve lives by allowing people to complete their normal activities of daily living.

“It’s really nice to see a person who instantly is able to walk better because of the brace I’ve just helped design and build for him,” says orthotist Sarah Lendrum. “What we do makes a huge difference in the quality of life for our patients.”

Braces include large body jackets to straighten the spine, head shape helmets for infants with abnormal head shapes, and ankle-foot and knee-ankle-foot braces to improve mobility and gait. For some people, braces are a permanent part of their lives and they wouldn’t be able to walk without them.

Similar work is also done at the Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital in Edmonton. Tools line work benches, while an oven heats plastic so it can be shaped around a mould. Orthotists, prosthetists and technicians can spend hours crafting a single brace, even with technology on their side.

Glenrose staff use the high-tech CADCAM (computer-aided design, computer-aided manufacturing) system that scans the body part requiring a brace – most commonly the head, leg or torso. Then technicians, using the CADCAM program, can carve a precise mould for building a brace or leg prosthesis.

"It’s a very good system for measuring and designing braces and allows us to build more effective braces for the treatment of scoliosis, for instance, perhaps saving some children from needing to undergo surgery for this condition,” says Glenrose orthotist Andreas Donauer.

Glenrose prosthetist Jim Moan uses a mobile computer system, called the Carver, to reduce the amount of time a prosthesis patient spends in hospital.

These patients usually stay in hospital for four to five weeks. Sometimes after a prosthesis is made, it needs to be changed because the limb it was designed to fit changed during the healing process. Instead of taking two or three days to re-cast a patient and craft a new prosthesis, the Carver completes the process in less than a day.

“We can take a precise scan and make a new prosthesis very quickly,” says Moan. “That’s extremely valuable because it means we can keep the disruptions to therapy to a minimum and promote earlier patient discharge.”

The orthotists, prosthetists and technicians are part of the rehabilitation team that includes doctors, nurses, physiotherapists and occupational therapists.