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.

Braces and the Expert

In previous posts I have stated how many problems I have been having with my braces. one of the suggestions I read was to take the braces to a local expert and asked for advice. I did call the company and after a few conversations they proposed that I come over at a time when they had a national expert on RGO braces to look at the situation and make suggestions.

Two weeks ago I did that. I brought the braces over and their expert, who is well known to my orthotist and has lectured in her classes, took a good look. After a couple of hours of having him look and having me walk back and forth in the parallel bars, he came up with a long list of changes he wanted in the braces. he felt that the hips were too loose, that the feet were at the wrong angle, that some of the attachments were of an incorrect length, that some of the attachments were put on correctly which might account for some mechanical weakness that we had been having and that I should be able to balance in the braces without using crutches as long as I am not moving. This is something that I clearly cannot do at the present time.

There was also a long discussion about alternate knees. There are two options: a purely mechanical system and an electromechanical system. The purely mechanical system uses a rod to lock the knee whenever the foot is resting on the ground and to release it when the foot is raised. The electromechanical system uses a sensor and what sounds like a motor but might actually be a brake to accomplish much the same thing. I plan to come back and try one or both of these systems if it is at all possible. Problems with the knees being locked at all times are a major subset of the difficulties that I have with my current braces and I am eager to explore alternatives although I am not sure quite what they will mean in terms of my gait or anything else that I might do.

I have sent the braces back to the manufacturer to have some of the changes made and plan to hire the local company to make other changes as much as possible. This means that I will spend several weeks to a month without the braces and plan to find other ways to exercise. I am hoping that what I get eventually will significantly improve my ability to walk.

Locked in the Van

a very curious thing happened to me a couple of weeks ago. I had coffee with a friend who has a high cervical injury and is in a motorized chair. Recently she acquired a van which allowed her to driver herself. We agreed to meet for coffee. When she got there she discovered that she was locked into the van with no way to get out.

Let me start by explaining how people spinal cord injuries drive. There are three options for ways to drive depending on the level of injury and the amount of work you are willing to do. for people with low levels of injury and good arm function, one option is to use a fairly ordinary car and after transferring from the wheelchair to the car disassemble the wheelchair and place it in the passenger seat. This is the option that I choose. When there is an able-bodied passenger the wheelchair may simply be placed in the back especially if the car is chosen with a large enough back to easily do this.

A second option is to choose a van with a ramp or a wheelchair lift. The ramp or lift requires a much larger parking space than is required for a car or even for the first option. If the person can easily transfer from the wheelchair into a seat it is possible to set up the van so that he can roll in up the ramp, part the wheelchair next to the driver seat and transfer from the chair into the seat. He can then drive the van from the drivers seat using hand controls similar to the first option.

For people who have difficulty transferring because of arm weakness and this will include most people were using motorized wheelchairs a third option is to drive from the wheelchair itself. In almost all cases this involves a motorized chair. There is no chair in the driver seat and once the chair is rolled up the ramp it is rolled into a special clamp in the driver seat and locked in place. The car may then be driven using hand controls with the person sitting in the wheelchair. When the person wants to leave the van he pushes a button unlocks the lock holding the wheelchair in place and allows him to roll backwards out of the clamp and then out of the van.

Now we go back to our story. The clamp is electromechanical and the release mechanism might fail. This is exactly what happened to my friend. The release mechanism failed to work and she was stuck with no way to get out of her car. I saw her drive up and rolled up into the van so that I could watch her get out  and thus pretty much saw the whole thing. The idea of being stuck in your car with no way to get out is, as you can imagine, very unpleasant. Eventually she was able to call the company that had installed the mechanism. Luckily, someone answered and was able to give her help. He explained that if the mechanism failed there was a lever that you could pull to release the chair. Unfortunately the lever is very deeply under a large electrical wheelchair. It is impossible to imagine someone with limited arm function being able to reach that far and engage the lever. Fortunately, I was there and was able to take the call. I drove my chair out of the van and around to the driver's side. My friend never opens the driver side door. She gets in to the ramp that comes out the side of the van. She had to move the car to create enough room for me to come around to the driver side and feel around for the box locking the chair. Eventually by feel rather than sight I was able to find lever and pull it unlocking the chair.

I found the entire incident very disturbing. Even knowing how to release the chair there is no way that my friend could have done so without external help. We considered several arrangement the most promising of which is to tie the release lever to the driver side door so that opening the door would release the wheelchair. The mechanics of this arrangement are not simple because the chair would have to drive over whatever attachment was made. I am very concerned about the idea that someone could be locked in their car with no way to release themselves.

I discussed this with a friend of mine at pushing boundaries who told me a story about a man who drove into a similar van which was parked in his garage with the ramp already down. After he had driven in causing his wheelchair to lock in the car, he discovered that the battery was dead and the car would not start and, of course, the unlocking mechanism would not work. Fortunately, he was able to use his cell phone to call AAA and they were able to get into the garage and recharge the battery. If he had been unable to use his phone or summon help in other ways he might well have died of hypothermia before he was able to get out.