A Train to Portland

This fall we are planning a trip to Eastern Europe. We are not planning to rent a car since the car would be of little use in most European cities and are planning to be dependent on public transportation. Public transportation is much better in Eastern Europe than it is in much of the United States although it is unclear how much of their public transportation will be wheelchair accessible. We decided to test how easy it was to get around with nothing but public transportation by planning a trip to Portland Oregon. The plan was to park at the local park and ride, take the bus to the train station, take the train to Portland and then use the Portland light rail to get around Portland.

We plan to do this with another couple. The man we're going with suffered a spinal injury at roughly the  same time that I did and has a similar level of injury so we expected to encounter relatively similar problems. Verna and I drove to the local park-and-ride and waited for the bus. After the bus was a half hour late and it looked like there was some danger of missing the train, we decided to abandon the first leg of our public transportation journey and to simply drive to the train station.

We met our friends at the station and were offered a special line to board the train and also the opportunity to board before other passengers. Amtrak has a ramp to allow wheelchairs to get on the train. It is a little steep at the end and I asked for help because I was a little afraid of becoming unstable in the steep portion like getting up was no real difficulty. they put us in a compartment where seats were removed in one area allowing wheelchairs to be parked. The area was a little bit small and I simply transferred into a train seat and stow the wheelchair for the rest of the journey allowing my friend to have the entire space.

To train the Portland is gorgeous running along Puget Sound for much of its length and then toward the end of along the Columbia River. The Portland station is in the middle of downtown and less than two blocks away there is a light rail station which can take you too much of Portland. An added bonus is that in downtown Portland the light rail is free. Light rail stations are elevated a couple of feet so that the station and the floor of the train are at the same level. There is a small ramp which bridges the gap between the train and station allowing a handicapped person to roll into the train. The hotel was only a couple of stops from the train station and we discovered, fortuitously, a nice food court at the tram stop allowing us to pick up lunch on the way to the hotel. We stayed at the Marriott in a room labeled as a handicap room although, other than some bars in the bathroom, I could not see much difference from a regular hotel. The door was heavy and difficult but not impossible to open from a wheelchair. out

After a nap we visited the Portland Saturday market, a collection largely craft stalls in a park and neighborhood on the Columbia River. The one stroll that I really remember was one which offered to sculpt a garden gnome in your shape.

That evening we went to a nice restaurant and came back to the hotel.

The next day we visited Portland Chinese garden. They have laid out has so that people in wheelchairs can get to much of the garden which has many interesting plants and a giant Koi pond.

One of the things that we learned on the trip was not to unbalance the wheelchair. On the way down I had a piece of luggage strapped to the front of the wheelchair on luggage carriers. The carriers worked well but the luggage, while small, was also that's happiest thing that we carried and coming down a steep ramp off of the train the wheelchair fell forward until I caught it with my arm. There was at least one other occasion when all of that weight on the front of the chair made life difficult. The conclusion was that we might carry less weight on the wheelchair but the weight that we carry should be balanced.

Blake Island

I have been going sailing with the group called footloose sailing. This group  provides the opportunity for handicapped people to go sailing. They have a number of able-bodied volunteers to help get people in the boats. They have a lift on the dock which can lower someone who cannot otherwise get in a boat into the boat. For people whose arms are limited they have boats where the controls are electric and can be run with a joystick. Throughout the summer they have days where disabled people will go out on their boats with a volunteer to help and supply knowledge.

The major event of the summer is a trip to Blake Island.  Blake Island is a state park in the middle of Puget Sound. There is an Indian Lodge on the island which does regular salmon cookouts. There are mooring docks and worry Louise allowing people to take boats over from Seattle, is about a two-hour motor, and a stay at the island. The park has a number of camping locations. Every year footloose organizes a Blake Island trip. Volunteers go over on Thursday and reserve a number of campsites. On Saturday morning the footloose boats and the number of boats contributed by interested parties load the camping gear for people who have signed up including those who are disabled.

This year we had five people with wheelchairs, several folks with walkers and canes and a group Down's syndrome. We also had a number of spouses, significant others and able-bodied volunteers. On Saturday morning everybody met at the Elliott Bay Marina on the Seattle waterfront and were assigned to boats. We had one person in an electric wheelchair. These devices way over 300 pounds and the group has no facilities to get them onto a boat so he went over with a tour group that visits the Indian Lodge. The rest of us piled into boats with all of our gear.

I took a small footstool which I intended to use as an aid to help me get out of and into my wheelchair. Unfortunately I had failed to communicate to my wife that we needed the boat with us rather than with our luggage which went on a separate boat. Verna was well aware of the fact that we needed to stool but failed to mention it. I thought she had sent it with the regular luggage and sent people searching for the stool when in fact Verna had kept it safely with the stuff that we needed on the boat. In the end it showed up and I was able to use it to get on the boat.

While this was supposed to be a sail it was fairly obvious as we set out that the sound was dead calm and that this was turning into a motor. We did not even attempt to raise the sale on the way over.

We got there and landed at a floating dock.there were some doubts as to whether I could get up the ramp to the dock but I was able to do this by grasping both sides of the railing on the walkway and pulling myself up. The campgrounds look like the picture a number of tents in a dry grassy field. There were greener parts of the park and one of the things that we noticed was a number of the very tame deer grazing on the grass in these areas. I saw groups of deer grazing within 20 feet of a playground full of children. Obviously these animals are aware that nothing bad is going to happen to.
   The funniest thing that happened was an incident in the evening. The only person on the trip in an electric wheelchair (which weighs 500 pounds) came over with a tour boat since it would be impossible for him to come in the sailboat. He came with an attendant. At some point he wandered off and his attendant was looking for him. He walked up to me and said "have you seen Brian?"

I responded "who's Brian".

He said "he's the guy in the wheelchair."

I told this story back at the campfire to the entire group which included about five people in wheelchairs and they completely broke up.

Solstice Parade

This Saturday I marched in the Fremont solstice Parade. The parade is a wild assortment of artistic types that runs through Fremont a neighborhood of Seattle which among other things is proud of a statue of Lenin located it what it calls the  "center of the world". I marched with a group of atheists who were carrying a representation of the flying spaghetti monster.

The monster and is accompanied by a group of pirates representing global warming (well read the Wikipedia article it describes how pirates or rather the lack thereof cause global warming). I was using the dragonfly which allowed me to make the approximately two-mile parade without requiring someone to push me or totally wearing myself out.

The parade always starts with a collection of nude bicyclists. This is an unofficial and not sanctioned but highly loved section of the parade.

The by cyclists are followed by a very eclectic collection of floats. The flying spaghetti monster is of course one of such a collection. This year, because Washington state has legalized gay marriage, there was a wedding cake float featuring a number of same-sex couples.

There was also a giant spider, a Dragon made of plastic garbage and numerous other floats.

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

Braille Display

I was at a board meeting for DisabilityPride when visitor who happened to be blind pulled out an interesting device. It was a Braille display terminal. The device maintained a wireless connection to her cell phone. It had a pad with a series of bumps that could be electrically raised or lowered creating braille characters based on text transmitted from the phone. In this sense it functioned very much like a conventional display terminal except for a blind person.

The display portion of the device look like the picture above taken from an product on Amazon. the actual device was a little more complex with several buttons which appeared to be able to send text possibly in a similar manner to that used by pre-smartphones.

I was, of course, amazed at the technology. I have known for some time that such a device would be possible and probably not extremely difficult to build. In fact, I have her discussion about turning the entire touch sensitive screen of something like an iPad into a braille display using vibration rather than raising of dots. It is a little unclear how this would work or even if it is possible. What is amazing is how practical such a device can be.

As an aside, we might wonder in an age where more devices are learning to speak in more clever ways whether braille is becoming increasingly obsolete as are smart devices are able to read and interpret what they see for blind people without passing through the touch sensitive stage.

Nonetheless I applaud the makers of the device and the users who can use it so effectively.