About the inventor of
Merry Walker Corporation Products
Mary M. Harroun, MS, LNHA is a creator, inventor of the Merry Walker Corporation product line. After spending about fifteen years in the long term care field working with elderly as a social worker, activity director, and nursing home administrator she realized that the elderly needed special medical equipment. In l990 the wheelchair and walker were the choices available to them. The main requirement for all of the equipment is that it had to be designed specifically for elderly to safely increase their functional mobility. She has stated that all elderly people all walked once and that they should be given the right and the correct equipment to assist them in walking again.

In l990, the first Merry Walker® Ambulation Device, was created. It was constructed of white PVC tubing. It was on the market for less than three years, when it was discovered that PVC was not the favored material for this product due to its lack of sustaining outside stress. When an end user sat down hard on the suspended seat, the PVC would crack and break. It was discovered that many of the PVC models were breaking due to this failure of material. At that time many copycats of Merry Walker in PVC were on the market. Only a few copycats are still available today, with the same breakdown problems.

In l993 Merry Walker was redesigned and a second patent was received to include the tubular steel design that makes Merry Walker what it is today, the preferred and highly recognized name and product in the marketplace. Merry Walker folds, is bottom weighted and is very small in size to fit the end user, and most importantly, the Merry Walker does not breakdown through continual use.

After Merry Walker was invented, Mary went on to create other products to solve other ambulation problems she had identified occurring in the elderly population. The Merry Motivator® was created to assist those elderly who were confined to geriatric chairs or recliners. This product assisted those elderly who were unable to walk at all, but would give them, through use of the Merry Motivator some seated mobility, decreasing further deterioration

The Merry Cart® was the next product created to assist Activity Departments in nursing homes to get their activity material organized to ease their job in therapy delivery to residents.

Following the first three products, Mary developed the Merry Therapeutic Cane® and Merry Therapeutic Walker® and decided to stress self-rehabilitation for the elderly. She realized that if the elderly population were going to receive the physical rehabilitation that they needed to return to functional mobility, they had have medical equipment available to them to so called, "Do it all by themselves". Merry Stand By Me® soon emerged and was added to this concept of self-rehabilitation. Getting elderly people out of wheelchairs has been the focus of the Merry Walker Corporation since l990.

In 2009, the Merry Seat Yourself™ was developed. The Merry Seat Yourself addresses the problem of long hallways for residents to walk, by offering a wall mounted, foldable seat. As many elderly perceive that the hall might be too long for them to walk, they prefer to be pushed in a wheelchair. Merry Seat Yourself will encourage resident walking as the seat will be available in the hallway for them to sit down on when rest is needed.

In the spring of 2004 an article appeared in the Chicago Tribune, identifying the possible reason why the institutionalized elderly are not walking, and certainly once they reached the need for nursing home care. The article led Mary to searching for more research on the topic of vitamin D and calcium deficiencies. This seems to be one of the most important underlying factors in why our 2 million institutionalized elderly are not walking. They are not absorbing calcium and are not receiving enough sun, therefore their bones and muscles are not rebuilding, causing them to fall, with the results of being placed in a wheelchair to never walk again. Medications and staff training also encourage residents to be placed prematurely into wheelchairs.

As a geriatric psychologist, Mary not only has developed products to assist people to return to walking and also continue walking, but; will continue to write and speak on these topics to geriatric forums. We are very proud at Merry Walker Corporation to not only being a certified woman owned business, but also one of the only durable medical equipment businesses in this country who continues to produce American made products. All of the Merry Walker Corporation products are Medicare billable, except, the Merry Cart and the Merry Seat Yourself.

As far as culture change and resident-centered care, with the focus on getting and keeping elderly walking, and out of wheelchairs, a comprehensive return to walking program has now been developed by Mary. This program trains nursing home staff to assess residents and come together to discuss the assessment findings in a totally new concept, called the Mobility Assessment Clinic. Each professional staff member will be taught a new assessment process focused on independent ambulation potential. After training, the staff will have recently assessed each individual resident from their discipline and come together with the other staff to focus and discuss mobility potential. Assistve equipment is assigned to the resident, as needed, and if found appropriate, the resident is then placed in a daily exercise program , called “Stepping On”, developed by Lindy Clemson, OT/R, PhD, Sydney, Australia. The Stepping On program is taught to the restorative CNA’s and overseen by physical therapists. If more information on this program is something you might be interested in, please contact Mary directly. She will be most to happy to discuss her project and offer her consulting services.

The Merry Walker Corporation looks forward to serving your needs or the needs of your loved ones. Please read through our web pages and if you should have any questions or comments; please feel free to submit them to us. We look forward to hearing from you in the near future.