An inflatable maze has scooped an NHS award for a Hastings group which works with people with profound disabilities.
Decoda Music Gym, which is based at Horntye Park, uses a variety of specialist equipment to help local disabled people find new ways to communicate.
Much of the equipment helps stimulate people's senses by using sight and sound and just last year
Premiership football club West Ham United sent club captain Lucas Neill to Hastings as part of the Premier League's Creating Chances campaign.
The Australian star spent a day at the music gym, playing with some of the users and chatting to staff after Decoda was picked out as one of the country's top projects.
And now one of its specialist pieces of equipment has won Decoda an NHS Health and Social Care Award.
The maze, dubbed the Decodamaze, is an interactive inflatable suitable for wheelchair users in which movement creates and alters images and sounds. Staff at Decoda say this encourages people to be more active.
For example banging on an air filled wall generates birdsong while other actions change the colour of projections or trigger film.
It forms part of the music gym held each Friday and the successful local enterprise has now been running for four years, attracting disabled people from all over 1066 Country.
One third of music gym members are wheelchair users so the Decoda team wanted to find a fun and exciting way of engaging them. The idea for an inflatable maze came from talking to the users who wanted a bouncy castle for wheelchairs.
The inflatable maze was bought from a local supplier and adapted to make it interactive. And, having came out tops in the NHS awards' innovative technology class, Decoda now plans to market the maze to other groups and, in doing so, help secure its long term future.
Tom Smurthwaite of Decoda said: "We're delighted that the maze has been recognised in this way. "All our ideas come from the people who use the Music Gym – this one came from a staff member at Glyne Gap School who wanted a safe but exciting way for young people in wheelchairs to have fun."
Susan Health, also of Decoda, added: "Technology is ubiquitous in society, but it has been under-used as an engagement tool for people with profound disabilities. In the maze the user has the opportunity to make something positive happen. This may happen very rarely in their lives. Here a simple movement can trigger changes in sound and images."
For more information on the music gym or Decoda please phone 01424 439192 or go to the website www.decoda.org.
