Grandma has a problem. She needs eggs to finish baking a birthday cake for her granddaughter. But as she lifts the curtain and looks outside the window, she sees snow on the walk, ice on the road, and she wonders if it’s a good idea to leave the house. She doesn’t want to slip. And it’s very cold. Maybe it’s best to stay inside, she thinks, even though she’s been inside for days.
Such a scenario isn’t uncommon. Mobility is an issue for many seniors and fears about slipping on ice and the dangers of cold weather are a concern for many more. Making life easier and safer is one of the areas of research at the iDAPT Centre for Rehabilitation Research, a $36 million, 65,000 square-foot research lab located at Toronto Rehabilitation Institute. At the core of iDAPT (short for Intelligent Design for Adaptation, Participation, and Technology), are seven simulators that replicate environments as diverse as Toronto’s downtown streetscape, a modest income home, and a hospital room. Geoff Fernie, Vice-President of Research at Toronto Rehab, says that simulation is the basis of the lab’s approach to rehab studies because simulation offers more soundness in research results.
“The thing I’ve found is that there is better research when done with simulations,” says Fernie. “We need objective testing to [draw conclusions],” and simulation is the way to create the most objective—in this case, true-to-life—scenarios possible.
Winter labBut back to Grandma. She’s afraid to leave the house because she might slip. Mobility issues, including a senior’s ability to keep balance, or a stroke patient’s ability to relearn walking, are some of the real-life issues that iDAPT attempts to tackle in the Winter Lab.
From the outside, Winter Lab looks like a big box, almost like a cooler for beer. The outside panels are painted to look like a northern Canadian landscape. Inside the box, the picture changes. The floor is made of a steel mesh lined with pink tubes filled with glycol. A harness system runs along the ceiling and attached to the walls are mounts for motion capture cameras. When iDAPT researchers are ready to run experiments, they fill the floor with water and freeze it, lower the temperature inside the lab to minus 15 C, and if they want to, send a 30 km wind blasting across the landscape. In a few months, the lab will have a snow machine to add to the reality of the scenario.
When the lab is set up, a hoist lifts it into the air and sets it on a motion simulator nested in the floor of the subbasement. Then the real work begins, as scientists place a person in the harness, tilt the lab to any angle, and experiment with mobility issues in winter conditions. It’s the most real winter scenario possible, short of stepping outside in mid-January or flying to Yellowknife, and it’s a lab that iDAPT is using to gain a better understanding of how icy conditions affect a person’s mobility.
Commercializing technology
Inside Winter Lab, iDAPT researchers are working with a shoe company to design a better winter shoe. In fact, all of the labs at iDAPT represent opportunities for the commercialization of research. “They are designed to accelerate how we get things from the lab to application,” says Fernie.
Sitting on the floor beside Winter Lab is Stair Lab and Street Lab. Inside Stair Lab is a stair case where researchers test different heights and rises of stairs with the hopes of creating staircase standards that will help reduce the number of falls experienced on stairs. Inside Street Lab is a virtual reality simulation of the streets outside of Toronto Rehab, complete with everything from newsstands to city monuments, the rumble of passing streetcars to the noise of birds and pedestrian signals, all of it in stereo sound. Researchers use Street Lab to understand how stroke patients regain the ability to walk and to test functionalities of a new kind of hearing aid.
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Such a scenario isn’t uncommon. Mobility is an issue for many seniors and fears about slipping on ice and the dangers of cold weather are a concern for many more. Making life easier and safer is one of the areas of research at the iDAPT Centre for Rehabilitation Research, a $36 million, 65,000 square-foot research lab located at Toronto Rehabilitation Institute. At the core of iDAPT (short for Intelligent Design for Adaptation, Participation, and Technology), are seven simulators that replicate environments as diverse as Toronto’s downtown streetscape, a modest income home, and a hospital room. Geoff Fernie, Vice-President of Research at Toronto Rehab, says that simulation is the basis of the lab’s approach to rehab studies because simulation offers more soundness in research results.
“The thing I’ve found is that there is better research when done with simulations,” says Fernie. “We need objective testing to [draw conclusions],” and simulation is the way to create the most objective—in this case, true-to-life—scenarios possible.
Winter labBut back to Grandma. She’s afraid to leave the house because she might slip. Mobility issues, including a senior’s ability to keep balance, or a stroke patient’s ability to relearn walking, are some of the real-life issues that iDAPT attempts to tackle in the Winter Lab.
From the outside, Winter Lab looks like a big box, almost like a cooler for beer. The outside panels are painted to look like a northern Canadian landscape. Inside the box, the picture changes. The floor is made of a steel mesh lined with pink tubes filled with glycol. A harness system runs along the ceiling and attached to the walls are mounts for motion capture cameras. When iDAPT researchers are ready to run experiments, they fill the floor with water and freeze it, lower the temperature inside the lab to minus 15 C, and if they want to, send a 30 km wind blasting across the landscape. In a few months, the lab will have a snow machine to add to the reality of the scenario.
When the lab is set up, a hoist lifts it into the air and sets it on a motion simulator nested in the floor of the subbasement. Then the real work begins, as scientists place a person in the harness, tilt the lab to any angle, and experiment with mobility issues in winter conditions. It’s the most real winter scenario possible, short of stepping outside in mid-January or flying to Yellowknife, and it’s a lab that iDAPT is using to gain a better understanding of how icy conditions affect a person’s mobility.
Commercializing technology
Inside Winter Lab, iDAPT researchers are working with a shoe company to design a better winter shoe. In fact, all of the labs at iDAPT represent opportunities for the commercialization of research. “They are designed to accelerate how we get things from the lab to application,” says Fernie.
Sitting on the floor beside Winter Lab is Stair Lab and Street Lab. Inside Stair Lab is a stair case where researchers test different heights and rises of stairs with the hopes of creating staircase standards that will help reduce the number of falls experienced on stairs. Inside Street Lab is a virtual reality simulation of the streets outside of Toronto Rehab, complete with everything from newsstands to city monuments, the rumble of passing streetcars to the noise of birds and pedestrian signals, all of it in stereo sound. Researchers use Street Lab to understand how stroke patients regain the ability to walk and to test functionalities of a new kind of hearing aid.
Click Here To Read Full Article:
