21st Sept: Teaching, workshops and a couple of breakthroughs

It's been a busy, busy week - for a few reasons - but a good one.

Most significantly, it's Fresher's - sorry, Induction Week. The undergraduates are back, and the campus is buzzing. I like the rhythms of the academic year: the calm of the student vacations, the frenetic pace of teaching. Things are always changing. I mentioned last week that this time of yead always has the sensation of racing towards a narrow gap in a solid wall. Well, this point is the gap. If you're not prepared, you'll be in for a chaotic 11 weeks. I think I'm there: slides, handouts, tutorials, projects ready. Only an exam to write: that's not bad at all.

Of course, this week has also been busy because we've been marking presentations from students returning from industrial placement and celebrating their achievements. And I've been at a fantastic neuro-engineering workshop, learning about the challenges of actually implanting devices. A little outside my area, but relevant to rehabilitatiin and spinal injury, and there are some exciting potential cross-overs with my biomechanics work.

Another big event this week was a Medical Humanities workshop in diagnosis. It was a great opportunity to get together with humanities researchers from History, English and Sociology and get their views on what diagnosis means, and some of the social, ethical and practical challenges it presents. A very productive meeting, and I'll try (no promises!) to write up my thoughts as a separate blog post sometime.

But the main business this week has been on the grip research front. Firstly, the revised version of FATKAT has survived its first test in data gathering, with the issues of lag and data losses in Network Streaming now resolved. That's a big landmark, and a vindication of the time I've poured into it over the last three weeks.

And my grip model has just survived cross - validation, which is another big landmark. We've just got to actually write it all up now!

7th &14th Sept : Getting a Grip in Every Sense

This post is now about ten days' late - holiday and family birthdays have kept me busy outside work, and work has been rapidly accelerating as term approaches. So this update will need to cover two weeks in one go.

    This time of year always has the sense of racing towards a narrow door in a brick wall at high speed: you really hope you haven't missed anything important. Are my handouts and slides ready? Have I got my tutorials and projects up-to-date? Because if not, next week it will be too late, and term will be spent firefighting.

    But my time has not been entirely dedicated to teaching prep. What has also kept me busy has been the work on grip research, with two items reaching fruition. Firstly, the FATKAT 2.0 software is now operational. This is a rewrite from scratch to address the network streaming issues that we encountered. It stores all data locally on the myRIO, and hence sample rates are decoupled from the host PC. This means that up to about 1kHz can be recorded - though if the host PC is slow, then high sample rates don't display well. It also introduces a trigger for QualiSys, so that data can be co-ordinated for validation purposes. This means that Will Shaw is ready to start runnjng his experiments this week. We also now have two working FATKAT systems, allowing us to operate parallel projects. Very handy for the undergraduate students who will be taking dissertations on grip with me!

The other thing that has me excited is the grip model that Rachel Coats, Mark Mon-Williams and I have been working on, and which has taken an epic amount of time this summer, has now produced some exciting results. I can't say much more until we've had the results published, but suffice to say that we have moved from data analysis to writing up.

Busy times - but very exciting!

  

W/c 24th August: Loose Ends

This update is coming late because I've been away on holiday ( it was great thanks), and didn't much fancy announcing the fact over the internet. Also, school holidays mean I'll be off the rest of this week, so there won't be an update til a week Friday (the 11th), since you probably aren't interested in my holiday snaps!

Given this, the week is something of an inflection point: a time to draw a line under old things, rather than starting anything new. So, although the grip data has reached a really exciting point - exploratory analysis complete, theorising and model-building ready to start - and a new MyRIO for FATKAT has arrived, allowing me to start rewriting the software, I've actually spent most of this week drawing a line under a review for the Journal of Engineering Design, making new grip surfaces for FATKAT, preparing handouts for teaching and papers for CWUAAT. A whole load of items finished, a load of new stuff to pick up on my return. See you then!