Student-Designed Tool Helps Kids Recovering From Neck Surgery

Dr. Matthew Oetgen doesn’t look forward to slipping a goniometer over his young patients’ heads.

The floppy headpiece topped with a multiarmed protractor measures range of motion after neck surgery and can predict quality of life months, even years later. But kids gotta be kids. Scared or uncomfortable, they fidget in the adult-size contraption, said Oetgen, division chief of orthopedic surgery and sports medicine at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C. Measurements are often imprecise, and thus unusable, frustrating parents.

“They ask, ‘What’s going to happen as they grow?’” Oetgen said. “‘Will they be able to look at side mirrors in the car at 16?’ ‘When they turn 21 will they have a normal life?’  Those questions are really difficult to answer because we’ve never had a good accounting of motion.”

But that could change with a recently developed digital tool that feeds a video of patients twisting their necks into artificial intelligence (AI) software, which spits out immediate, precise measurements—no goniometers necessary. Co-designed by University of Maryland undergraduate students, the tool works on any phone or device with a camera.

The students are part of the App Dev Club, which develops software solutions for large U.S. organizations like Amazon, Booz Allen Hamilton and Mitsubishi. Each semester, its 400 members split into small teams, each committed to a project based on a client’s need. Club members in return strengthen their skills and have leveraged their experience to land recent internships with Amazon, Meta, Google and Microsoft. 

Last year Oetgen tested the students’ tool on a group of children ages 6 to 14. After his team makes some tweaks, he aspires to lead a national clinical trial this year. “We got some good data that shows we’re on the right track,” he said.

The project materialized after Oetgen contacted the hospital’s Sheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation, which develops AI-based devices among other technologies, about building a computer-vision tool to measure his patients’ range of motion. Its researchers had collaborated with App Dev on other projects and now asked students to build a product around its engineering design. 

Atheesh Thirumalairajan ’26, a computer science major from Seattle and App Dev president, jumped at the idea. “I don’t like seeing children uncomfortable,” he said. “This was a path to help tens of thousands of lives in Children’s Hospital branches across the globe.”

The 15-person team representing computer science, engineering, information science and business majors developed 25,000 lines of code and ensured cross-platform functionality. Knowing that children sporadically jerk their heads during exams, it taught the machine to ignore rapid movements.

When the team traveled to the hospital for a demonstration, doctors tested it on each other and approved of their progress. “We didn’t even teach them how to use it, it was so intuitive,” Thirumalairajan recalled.

The tool’s simplicity allows parents to use it at home, eliminating time off work for hospital visits. It gives physical therapists peace of mind, letting them know when to ease pressure when maximum range of motion has been achieved.

Since developing the tool, the App Dev Club has continued collaborating with the hospital, and is currently building a machine learning app for doctors who treat injured soccer players. If successful, clinicians will use the app to record patients in recovery as they go through kicking routines, flagging mechanics known to cause injuries.   

“The App Dev Club brings their software engineering skills, which helps translate our research into software applications, which is one thing I like about this collaboration,” said Syed Anwar, principal investigator at the hospital’s Sheikh Zayed Institute, who engineered the algorithm and software for the for neck range-of-motion tool.