A typical five-month-old infant has hardly figured out how to sit up yet — even crawling may be months away — but there are a few babies who already know how to drive. They’re steering their very own mobile robots.
The robots are designed to allow babies with disabilities to move around independently, at the same age their peers might learn to crawl. Whether they use robots or their own limbs, starting to move may be an important part of baby brain development, some childhood specialists think. Researchers don’t want kids with cerebral palsy or other movement disorders to miss out.
"We think that babies with disabilities are missing an opportunity for learning that typically developing babies have," said Carole Dennis, a professor occupational therapy at Ithaca College in New York.
