A Walking Junkyard

what the picture below illustrates is the technology used to measure the joint position on the device. A shaft, at least a half inch in diameter and probably larger is held by to iron pillow blocks. These are the blue pieces shown at the center of the shot. The position is measured by a potentiometer, that is a variable resistor on the white circuit board at the left. A lot was made of the fact that the electrical connectors are all RJ11connectors that were removed from older telephones. This is an interesting piece of recycling of fairly generic equipment but the RJ11 is by modern standards a fairly large connector. In modern times there might be a high temptation to use wireless to connect everything and if not wireless to use some form of Ethernet  or even to choose a modern micro USB which is widely available for very small amounts of money and takes up significantly less room. More significant, however is a choice of an extremely large and heavy iron pillow block to hold the assembly. These were chosen because they are donated and would certainly do the task in a device where weight is simply not a consideration.

it is very interesting that going to the website they shall walk.org there is a picture of the small Indian child in a wheelchair and a picture of the team shown below in which the only thing that is in a wheelchair is the air tank. I searched the site long and hard and although they are up to version 15 of the suit it is very difficult to see a picture of any version at all.

I am not sure that I am totally shocked by this. Given this problem and given my condition I could walk into Microsoft research today and present a very convincing case that exoskeleton for a paraplegic represents an interesting and novel piece of wearable computation with major novel user interface problems. This is exactly what that organization loves. Okay

Polio

I was at the University of Washington's spinal injury forum  a great place to meet people with similar issues and injuries as well as those whose problems are subtly different. I work at an organization called Disability Pride (another post) with a number of folks with different physical and mental disabilities including a couple of folks with Osteiogenesis Imperfecta. This is a condition leading to a reduced height and fragile bones. Frequently these people are in wheelchairs. At the forum I found myself chatting with a woman in a wheelchair, a little larger than my friends but not very large. She stated that her condition was Osteiogenesis Imperfecta. Of course we chatted about our mutual friends. I thought that everyone in town with that rare condition would know others with a similar affliction.
After a while she introduced her daughter, also in a wheelchair. The daughter was a brown skinned girl, maybe in her mid teens. I asked whether she had Osteiogenesis Imperfecta and she replied "no I had polio'. I almost blurted out "wait you are too young - no one gets polio anymore". Then I reconsidered her skin and the likelihood that she might not be from this country. Suddenly it became clear - who would adopt a child confined to a wheelchair but someone used to living in a wheelchair herself.
The daughter it turns out is adopted and is from India.

Gimp in the Air

I have not been flying since my accident and I had some serious doubts as to whether I would ever want to get in the air again. Eventually a friend who I had introduced a flying persuaded me to try to get in his aircraft. He has a high wing plane and the seats are considerably above the level of my wheelchair and I had grave doubts that I would ever be able to get into the craft. Eventually I was persuaded to try and the solution that we came up with is shown in greater detail below.

Having found that I could fly, the next question is whether I was willing to do so. We went up and took a short 25 mile flight to a local airport with a nice restaurant. We had lunch and then flew home. Pilots called this the one hundred dollar hamburger because at the time the expression was coined it would cost about a hundred dollars to rent a plane and make that kind of a flight. Given fuel prices and the cost of aircraft one hundred dollars might be an underestimate but if you on your own plane it is not that far off.

Once I found that I was both physically and psychologically prepared to fly we decided to go to our college reunion. Every year Caltech has a seminar day in which professors give talks on interesting topics and all of the alumni come down for a grand reunion. This meant that we needed to fly from Seattle to Los Angeles. Since my friend's sister lives a little bit east of Sacramento her place made an obvious intermediate stop. The route we took is shown below. on the first day we flew to the middle of Oregon, refueled and then flew to the Auburn California airport. Auburn was not our first destination but in the air I read a NOTAM, and FAA notification on our original destination and discovered that the runway was closed so we called his sister on our cell phone and shows a new destination.

the next day we flew to Bakersfield and picked up a package that I had arranged to be left at one of the companies headquartered the airport . From there he flew into Van Nuys, a very busy airport with lots of private jets landing. That evening my friend went to his fortieth reunion dinner, I was in a slightly earlier class and I went out to dinner with a friend of mine.

The next day we went to seminar day. The first talk I went to was on a technique for treating spinal cord injuries by implanting an electrical stimulator below the injury. The talk was fascinating and I spent a significant period of time afterwards talking with the professor but that is another blog entry. The other talks I went to covered development of a vaccine for AIDS given by a Nobel Prize laureate who used to be the president of Caltech, a lecture from one of the directors of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on water in the outer solar system, a lecture on the new Mars Rover, a lecture on climate change and how models of clouds change the picture.

That night we went to the alumni barbecue and met some of my old classmates.

The next day we took off for Auburn where my friends sister had organized a musical get together allowing my friend to demonstrate his fiddling skills.

That night we got to watch an annular solar eclipse. Had we been in Seattle eclipse would be obscured by clouds but in California the viewing was excellent.

On the way north we looked past Mount Shasta giving us some excellent pictures. In Oregon we were forced by clouds to stop at Medford and my friend, who had recently gotten his instrument rating got to file an instrument flight plan for the rest of the trip back to Seattle. We spent the time beyond Medford in and out of clouds eventually flying through a solid line of clouds about a half a mile thick a few miles south of the Renton airport that was our home.

It was a great trip and I realize how much I love flying and I hope I will he be able to continue to do so.

Getting Into the Plane
Transferring from the chair across the landing gear to a bathroom chair

 

Transferring from the bathroom chair to the back of the plane behind the seats

Transferring onto the passenger seat - slid as far back as possible

Bringing my feet over the pilots seat