Four Seasons
Tonya and I went to the Four Season’s Centre to see a production of Mozart’s, The Magic Flute (an opera). It was my first visit to the building. It’s even more beautiful inside than from the outside.
Big Screen
Yue and Adam in front of the new screen that was just installed at the lab. The idea is we’ll be able to view and work on solid works drawings at life-size. What’s crazy is that each of the 80 tiles has 1080P resolution. But computers don’t have the horspower to be able to drive the full screen at full-res. Right now, the best we can do is half-res.
CEAL Simulator Pod Change
This is a timelapse of Susan and Larry taking StairLab off the simulator platform and placing StreetLab in its place. Right now it takes about a day to complete a pod swap. Most of that time is spent undoing and redoing ~100 bolts by hand. The goal is to get the swap time down to half a day by replacing existing bolts with fewer larger easier to access fasteners.
Music by Moby - Isolate (Mixhell Remix)
If you don’t already know what CEAL or these pods are for, see here for an explanation.
Spikes
This photo and the one yesterday were entered in a photo contest. My mom finds these cleat things really work to cut chances of slipping on ice.
Thesis in 100 words
Tonya helped me print off and bind five copies of my thesis yesterday. This is the 100 word cloud my 52075 word thesis generated. Here’s what it’s about if your interested.
Don’t get too excited. There’s still a ways to go. This is in preparation for my departmental exam. After that, we have the final defence … some time in April.
Happy 2012
Happy New Year!
Tonya demonstrating her light painting skills on the Mill Race in St. Jacobs.
Winter Wonderland
Taken after a recent snow fall turned the Mill Race in St. Jacobs into a winter wonderland.
Miss Movember
Kathleen participated in Movember this year. Of everyone I know involved in Movember, she’s put in the most effort and shown the greatest committment – by far. I can attest to the fact that she held up her end of the bargain and wore a different mustache to work every day of the month. Well played Kathleen. Well played.
You can see all of her mustaches here. Please note that today is your last chance to donate.
Bam Bam our new Roomba
Here’s our new Roomba exploring his new home for the first time. We’ve named him Bam Bam due to his propensity for running into things. We love him.
Does anyone else think vacuum is spelled wrong?
Media Coverage of Toronto Rehab’s New Labs
Our public relations went all out. All the major news outlets covered the launch.
Introduction to Toronto Rehab’s Labs:
Toronto Star:
City TV:
Global National:
Global Toronto News Hour:
Global TV News:
CTV:
CBC:
Globe and Mail:
Daily Planet:
OMNI (Mandarin):
Space Network:
Toronto Star articles are online here and here. Globe and Mail here and here. National Post here. Thanks to Jenny Campos/Tonya Martin for gathering/recording all these links. Finally, Jeremy Fernie took some photos at the event that you can see here. I put together a little explanation of how StairLab works here. Here’s a timelapse showing how the labs get swapped on and off the simulator platform. For more info on these labs look here.
StairLab
StairLab is one of the 6 new labs launched today at Toronto Rehab. 3 of the new labs are self-contained pods like this one that can be lifted up and placed on a motion platform (essentially the base of a flight simulator). In this lab, we study how small changes in stair geometry can reduce risk of injury. We have the ability to carefully measure how people move on stairs and even shake the pod and staircase to cause participants to lose their balance while they are safely harnessed. This could allow us to test what the optimal shape and placement of handrails are to recover from a fall. We also work with people involved in injury forensics in litigation. These are the people who investigate accidents and testify in court. Some of these experts believe rates of stair related injury are on the rise in Canada because of a problem they call “top of flight defect“. They’ve noted this defect is often present in fatalities and other serious injuries from the top of a staircase. When stairs are built off-site and installed in a home, often there is a missing nosing at the top landing. This can result in the first step appearing larger than the second step resulting in an overstep on the second step. This post explains the problem more clearly.
The video above shows StairLab on the motion base being tilted into “stair mode”. The stairs were built at an angle to allow for a full 8 steps to fit in the pod. Also, the shallow angle of the stairs makes the job of the robotic harness system easier. Harness robot stays above you as you move up the stairs and because the height doesn’t change a lot as you move from the bottom to the top, the harness robot doesn’t have to deal with as much slack in the system. The small movements the simulator makes once in stair mode are the jolts used to put participants off-balance. these look small but they are ~20cm translations that make it very hard to stay on your feet.
In StairLab, we’ll be able to test issues like the top of flight defect to see how big a problem they really are.
Rings
One of the indoor installations at Nuit Blanche. This one would throbbed as it shifted between colours.
Fake Rain
Another installation at Nuit Blanche this year. People lined up to walk through the downpour.
Borg vs. McEnroe
The famous 4th set tie-breaker between Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe at the 1980 Wimbeldon final was re-enacted shot for shot at Nuit Blanche.
Fire Breathing Heart Machine
Perhaps the most interesting installation at Nuit Blanche for me this year. There were four of these things each labeled as a different artery or vein (eg superior vena cava, etc). The public was able to interact with touch pads to cause balls of fire to erupt.
