Hi internet! Remember me?
It's over a year since I started this Blog - and more than six months since I last posted! Wowsers! So much for fortnightly, eh?
That is, in part, due to the birth of my second child in the spring (she's doing well, thanks - as are her sister and mother!). You forget how disruptive babies can be! And of course, the rest of life doesn't go away - you can't abruptly refuse to deliver lectures, or mark coursework, or supervise students just because you've had a new baby... And I've had four(!) research students reach viva in the last six months (all passing with minor corrections, thankfully!), with another four in the process of writing up. All stuff that can't easily be dropped!
Anyway life has settled down again, and my bandwidth has returned to the point at which I can think about things like blogs again - so here I am! Where to start? Well, perhaps it's best to start by looking back at the last six months first (and how those aims for the new year are shaping up) and then forwards to the future.
So here we go. I set myself three priorities: funding proposals; getting hands on with the research; and getting more engaged with stakeholders (especially disabled people's organisations). Let's see how the first half of 2014 fared on these fronts!
First up, the Fellowship didn't go in in March. It's still not in, though it's moved on a long way since January, despite babies and PhD Vivas and whatnot. The details are finalised: it's just a matter of costing, letters of support and trying to fit it all down to the requisite seven pages. There can, of course, be something of the old Pareto principle here: it takes a disproportionately long time to dot the 'i's and cross the 't's and it really isn't as exciting as actually having the ideas and working up the proposal in the first place. Still, it's got to be done. On top of that, there's an exciting opportunity to get involved in hosting a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship, which would really help us to get some of the seating work I've been doing up and running; and also the possibility of following up some of the work on the engineering imagination, looking at how we can encourage this in engineers. There are other opportunities, but the name of the game is actually getting these submitted: there's always the danger of hopping from one idea to another, and no one measures you on the number of proposals you started.
Second, getting more hands on has been going rather well. I've deliberately carved out some time to work on projects, and one consequence is that I've had the opportunity to flex more of my programming skills. I've implemented a stereoscopic triangulation algorithm for marker tracking using Ian Flatters' Wiimote rigs (which feeds directly into the fellowship); I've built a force platform for measuring centre of pressure; I've been working up the manipulandum in more detail; and I've built a switch-accessible game for Together Through Play from scratch using Pygame and the Arduino (more on that below!). Optotrak has taken a back seat for the time being, as some interesting opportunities have arisen with the manipulandum, and I'm currently working with Sarah Astill over in Sports and Exercise Science to build it into a rig that we can use for studying force control in spinal injury patients. And National Instruments have been kind enough to fund a summer student, the outstanding Stuart Watt, to help develop it, as part a stress test for their new myRIO platform. By the by, we do have a PhD studentship on the go in this area, if you happen to be looking...
Number three, getting more engaged with stakeholders has not moved forwards yet - but I'm optimistic that it's about to. Some opportunities to get involved in an Enabled by Design hackathon offer some promising leads, and we've been showing off the results of Together Through Play down at New Designers, and will be heading off for a Breeze on Tour event next week - so at least my head's above the parapet, there. Just got to make the most of these opportunities...
So, that's the last six months in a nutshell. The immediate future holds more of the same: finishing off those proposals, re-establishing some old partnerships that have rather lapsed in the last 12 months, building new bridges and getting the manipulandum polished off and used. It's going to be a good summer, I reckon.
But what of the blog? Well, I'd like to move away from these lengthy reflective posts, towards something a bit more focussed. And there are two things I'd like to include. One is the outcomes of research. I still owe a summary of the outcomes from K005; and with Together Through Play finished there's a nice opportunity to summarise the outcomes which we're writing up for publication. The other is to do some thinking aloud: Mark Mon-Williams and I are looking into grip modelling, and it seems like this would be a good place to chalk down a few ideas, and describe the major concepts behind it.
So stay tuned!
Wednesday, 30 July 2014
Monday, 13 January 2014
No New Year's Resolutions
I don't do New Years' Resolutions. Or rather, eighteen years ago,
I made a New Year's Resolution to stop making New Years' Resolutions,
and it's the only one I've ever managed to stick to! That's partly
because I don't see the New Year as anything intrinsically special –
if there are things that need to be done differently, then there's no
time like the present, right?
That said, there are certain points in the year where the deadlines and daily commitments recede enough that you can spend a bit of time planning ahead, and the New Year is generally one of them. The others, for me, are the start and end of the summer – it's a good time to put your house in order, check that the To Do list is up-to-date, and make sure you're planning in time for the important activities, not just those that are most urgent. Funnily enough, I've just been reading a couple of other posts on exactly that subject. Then again, I've also just been reading that the blog is dead – d'oh! And just when I was getting my into stride, too...
So, what are my plans for the spring, then?
The top priority is funding proposals. I was named as an investigator on just three funding proposals last year, and I wasn't Principle Investigator on any of them. The priority last year really was on tidying up ongoing research – finishing Together Through Play, submitting publications, and reviewing theses. But it's not as if I haven't been working on proposals. I've built up a backlog of four that are getting close to completion, and my goal this year is to get them all submitted. I'm not unrealistic enough to think I'll get them all done this spring, but I would at least like to have my EPSRC Early Career Fellowship in by the end of March. Not least as I'm expecting to take some paternity leave in March! We'll see how that goes.
Another priority is to be hands-on with my research this year. I was going to say “more hands on”, but I think I've been doing this pretty effectively over the last 18 months. Nevertheless, I want to make sure that that continues. The time I've spent with Arduinos, Raspberry Pis, Python and LabVIEW over that period, and the time spent building the manipulandum has really brought home to me the benefits of keeping your technical skills sharp.
For one thing, it makes you an actual engineer, rather than someone who just “thinks about engineering”. It also means that all the technical skills don't walk out the door with every PhD student who graduates, or PDRA who moves on to better things. And it's much easier to supervise projects when you have a good idea of how to implement things yourself, rather than when you're depending on third parties for support – I found this when I ended up being the technical support on the Together Through Play project. That, and it makes proposal writing much easier.
I've already spent an afternoon with Opotrak this year, looking at getting the manipulandum up and running with it, and developing some data capture and post-processing software to go with it. It's a slow process, not least as this is effectively “overtime” - work I have to put in over and above my day-to-day teaching and supervision duties. Still, it makes me tick, and scratches an itch that you don't get just telling other people about doing this, or in the case of PhD students, watching other people do it on your behalf.
Another thing that I want to do this year is to try and get more engaged with Disabled People's organisations here in Leeds. One of the many things that Together Through Play has opened my eyes to is the number of these organisations here in Leeds, and it makes sense to try and get involved with them. I'm viewing the collaboration with Breeze as a step towards this. Experience tells me that this is anything but easy – you don't get a workload allowance for it, so it's another thing that you end up doing over and above normal duties, mixed in with caring for your family, and trying to sustain some semblance of work-life balance. So I'm always a bit trepidacious: but there's also the risk of having a bunch of ideas that are really just technical toys, or taking disability as an “interesting theoretical problem” to be solved with gadgets. Or research as voyeurism – that's another risk. After all, just because educators or clinicians, or other researchers want the tools you're working on, doesn't automatically mean they'll benefit the people who kindly volunteer for your research. So, we'll see how that goes, too.
No resolutions, then, but a few targets. It's going to be an interesting year.
That said, there are certain points in the year where the deadlines and daily commitments recede enough that you can spend a bit of time planning ahead, and the New Year is generally one of them. The others, for me, are the start and end of the summer – it's a good time to put your house in order, check that the To Do list is up-to-date, and make sure you're planning in time for the important activities, not just those that are most urgent. Funnily enough, I've just been reading a couple of other posts on exactly that subject. Then again, I've also just been reading that the blog is dead – d'oh! And just when I was getting my into stride, too...
So, what are my plans for the spring, then?
The top priority is funding proposals. I was named as an investigator on just three funding proposals last year, and I wasn't Principle Investigator on any of them. The priority last year really was on tidying up ongoing research – finishing Together Through Play, submitting publications, and reviewing theses. But it's not as if I haven't been working on proposals. I've built up a backlog of four that are getting close to completion, and my goal this year is to get them all submitted. I'm not unrealistic enough to think I'll get them all done this spring, but I would at least like to have my EPSRC Early Career Fellowship in by the end of March. Not least as I'm expecting to take some paternity leave in March! We'll see how that goes.
Another priority is to be hands-on with my research this year. I was going to say “more hands on”, but I think I've been doing this pretty effectively over the last 18 months. Nevertheless, I want to make sure that that continues. The time I've spent with Arduinos, Raspberry Pis, Python and LabVIEW over that period, and the time spent building the manipulandum has really brought home to me the benefits of keeping your technical skills sharp.
For one thing, it makes you an actual engineer, rather than someone who just “thinks about engineering”. It also means that all the technical skills don't walk out the door with every PhD student who graduates, or PDRA who moves on to better things. And it's much easier to supervise projects when you have a good idea of how to implement things yourself, rather than when you're depending on third parties for support – I found this when I ended up being the technical support on the Together Through Play project. That, and it makes proposal writing much easier.
I've already spent an afternoon with Opotrak this year, looking at getting the manipulandum up and running with it, and developing some data capture and post-processing software to go with it. It's a slow process, not least as this is effectively “overtime” - work I have to put in over and above my day-to-day teaching and supervision duties. Still, it makes me tick, and scratches an itch that you don't get just telling other people about doing this, or in the case of PhD students, watching other people do it on your behalf.
Another thing that I want to do this year is to try and get more engaged with Disabled People's organisations here in Leeds. One of the many things that Together Through Play has opened my eyes to is the number of these organisations here in Leeds, and it makes sense to try and get involved with them. I'm viewing the collaboration with Breeze as a step towards this. Experience tells me that this is anything but easy – you don't get a workload allowance for it, so it's another thing that you end up doing over and above normal duties, mixed in with caring for your family, and trying to sustain some semblance of work-life balance. So I'm always a bit trepidacious: but there's also the risk of having a bunch of ideas that are really just technical toys, or taking disability as an “interesting theoretical problem” to be solved with gadgets. Or research as voyeurism – that's another risk. After all, just because educators or clinicians, or other researchers want the tools you're working on, doesn't automatically mean they'll benefit the people who kindly volunteer for your research. So, we'll see how that goes, too.
No resolutions, then, but a few targets. It's going to be an interesting year.
Saturday, 21 December 2013
And so this is Christmas....
Or it will be shortly, and I thought I'd post one more time before the Christmas break and the start of 2014. I had intended to end the year by coming to come conclusions about the whole K005 project, and what we learned from it - but I'll leave that to the New Year.
Instead, the classic way to end the year is with a Year in Review type post! I'm sure you'll be thrilled. It's be an interesting year and no mistake, and as 2013 turns into 2014, there's a sense of a change in eras, for a few reasons. Alexis Lefevre, one of my PhD students, has just successfully passed his viva (congratulations, Alexis!), exploring how age, object size and texture impacted the reach-to-grasp action. He did a really nice piece of work, though to date we've only published one paper from it so far - but if you're interested it's available Open Access via PLOS One:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0069040
It was another piece of Alexis' design that gave me the idea for the prototype manipulandum I was showing off not so long ago - his system of interchangeable and end caps attached to a force sensor, allowing rapid variation of size and texture, is quite ingenious. I'll talk you through it, some time: there are a few interesting results, but I don't want to show off too much before we find out where we are with publications. Mark Mon-Williams and I will hopefully be completing the revised version and wiring it up to Opotrak in the New Year.
The massively talented Ian Flatters, another of my PhD students, is now finishing his time with us - off to take a well-deserved place with a surgical tech company, and awaiting viva. But he's still in Leeds, and will be getting a day a month as a visiting researcher, so it isn't goodbye quite yet.
On top of that, Together Through Play ends in about week - and since neither myself, Angharad or Anne-Marie will be doing any more work before the new year, it is, too all intents and purposes, finished. I've just got to right the report, now!
So, there is more of a sense of wheels turning, and a changing of the guard than usual this year. But of course, that just means new things to look forward to, and I'm hopeful that 2014 is going to be a cracker. Mark Mon-Williams gave a rousing speech to our PACLab (Perception Action Cognition Lab) meeting on Wednesday, and as I wind down to take a break, there's a whole bunch of exciting stuff coming online in the new year. Here's a few:
1) Getting the manipulandum up and running. That'll be a good one - I've taken Alexis' design and run with it, and I'm really excited to keep expanding the grip work that Mark and I have been doing. There are some fresh collaborations coming up related to DCD and Spinal Cord Injury. Exciting stuff!
2) Playday 2014: Having missed every Playday during the course of the project, I promised myself we'd do something for 2014, and Leeds Philosopohical and Literary Society have kindly put money towards running an inclusive play event. So, we've assembled a student team, and we're working with Leeds City Council's Breeze initiative to offer something good this year. We have user panels coming up in February - I can't wait!
3) LUDI - I'm part of an EU-funded COST action (Collaboration on Science and Technology), looking at the issue of play for disabled children, bringing together researchers from across Europe - and beyond! I'm really looking forward to it - it feels like there's a lot of opportunity coming up now!
.
It's been interesting getting started with the blog, and I'm still finding my feet. Finding time to blog regularly is much harder than I had imagined, but it's a nice opportunity to get my thoughts and reflections down, so I'll be pressing on in the new year. A few things I'd like to cover are the final outcome of K005, findings from Alexis's PhD, the outcomes of K005, and I'd like to reflect a little more on a recent Twitter discussion on Accessibility vs Inclusivity - it's a really interesting debate, and ties in a lot with what we've discovered in K005. That and the manipulandum, of course!
Anyway, have a great Christmas and a Happy New Year - I'll be back in 2014!
Instead, the classic way to end the year is with a Year in Review type post! I'm sure you'll be thrilled. It's be an interesting year and no mistake, and as 2013 turns into 2014, there's a sense of a change in eras, for a few reasons. Alexis Lefevre, one of my PhD students, has just successfully passed his viva (congratulations, Alexis!), exploring how age, object size and texture impacted the reach-to-grasp action. He did a really nice piece of work, though to date we've only published one paper from it so far - but if you're interested it's available Open Access via PLOS One:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0069040
It was another piece of Alexis' design that gave me the idea for the prototype manipulandum I was showing off not so long ago - his system of interchangeable and end caps attached to a force sensor, allowing rapid variation of size and texture, is quite ingenious. I'll talk you through it, some time: there are a few interesting results, but I don't want to show off too much before we find out where we are with publications. Mark Mon-Williams and I will hopefully be completing the revised version and wiring it up to Opotrak in the New Year.
The massively talented Ian Flatters, another of my PhD students, is now finishing his time with us - off to take a well-deserved place with a surgical tech company, and awaiting viva. But he's still in Leeds, and will be getting a day a month as a visiting researcher, so it isn't goodbye quite yet.
On top of that, Together Through Play ends in about week - and since neither myself, Angharad or Anne-Marie will be doing any more work before the new year, it is, too all intents and purposes, finished. I've just got to right the report, now!
So, there is more of a sense of wheels turning, and a changing of the guard than usual this year. But of course, that just means new things to look forward to, and I'm hopeful that 2014 is going to be a cracker. Mark Mon-Williams gave a rousing speech to our PACLab (Perception Action Cognition Lab) meeting on Wednesday, and as I wind down to take a break, there's a whole bunch of exciting stuff coming online in the new year. Here's a few:
1) Getting the manipulandum up and running. That'll be a good one - I've taken Alexis' design and run with it, and I'm really excited to keep expanding the grip work that Mark and I have been doing. There are some fresh collaborations coming up related to DCD and Spinal Cord Injury. Exciting stuff!
2) Playday 2014: Having missed every Playday during the course of the project, I promised myself we'd do something for 2014, and Leeds Philosopohical and Literary Society have kindly put money towards running an inclusive play event. So, we've assembled a student team, and we're working with Leeds City Council's Breeze initiative to offer something good this year. We have user panels coming up in February - I can't wait!
3) LUDI - I'm part of an EU-funded COST action (Collaboration on Science and Technology), looking at the issue of play for disabled children, bringing together researchers from across Europe - and beyond! I'm really looking forward to it - it feels like there's a lot of opportunity coming up now!
.
It's been interesting getting started with the blog, and I'm still finding my feet. Finding time to blog regularly is much harder than I had imagined, but it's a nice opportunity to get my thoughts and reflections down, so I'll be pressing on in the new year. A few things I'd like to cover are the final outcome of K005, findings from Alexis's PhD, the outcomes of K005, and I'd like to reflect a little more on a recent Twitter discussion on Accessibility vs Inclusivity - it's a really interesting debate, and ties in a lot with what we've discovered in K005. That and the manipulandum, of course!
Anyway, have a great Christmas and a Happy New Year - I'll be back in 2014!
Wednesday, 4 December 2013
The project formerly known as K005... Part 2!
I won't repeat the question about where the time goes. It's been
busy, busy times here in Leeds - three of my research students have
submitted their theses since I last posted, and there are two more in
the process of writing up. And a new one has started. And on top of
that, we're finishing off the Together Through Play project, which is
exciting, but time consuming, especially in the middle of teaching!
Trying to get into schools for the final round of feedback (with
prototypes!) really puts the pressure on!
Anyway, there's lots to say about that, but I'll save it for another time. For now, I wanted to recount a little more about our K005 rehabilitation joystick, especially since it got a plug from the Royal Society on Twitter today! This project was funded through the NIHR, who allocated it the code K005 - it's official title was "Novel interactive peer-group activity movement exercise (iP-GAME) System for children with Cerebral Palsy", which is quite a mouthful, so we always just called the project "K005". It was punchy, and we grew fond of it, even if it's a bit obscure to anyone who doesn't know the project! The system is known as hCAAR these days
I mentioned in my previous post, that I'd been brought on board a project to develop a home-based rehabilitation joystick by Professors Martin Levesley and Bipin Bhakta, whose brainchild the whole system is. We'd developed and tested a simple joystick to allow children to practice reach/retrieve type exercises at home, with power assistance to help guide them through an appropriate trajectory. The results were promising, but the children who participated indicated that they liked to play with friends. And so we were off, trying to extend the system to multiplayer games for use in a school environment.
This is much, much easier said than done. Originally, we had envisaged a set of standalone joysticks, where they could be plugged into any PC by USB, and the games played on them. They'd be portable, flexible (in use I mean – rather than physically bendy, which would have been interesting, but not much help!), easy to move and store... and you could get four or so of them attached to a computer, and a few friends could play together. What could go wrong?
Well, we've always adopted a user-centred approach to our design, so the first order of business was to visit schools, speak to teachers, look at the intended environment – and it quickly became obvious that our original idea wasn't going to work. Portable, plug-in joysticks were a lovely concept, but the teachers who we worked with pointed out that time was at a premium – they couldn't afford to have the class sat waiting for even a few minutes while they got joysticks out of cupboards, made space for them, plugged them in, and so on.
They wanted something self-contained: something that you could push a button on, and it would just work. That meant a self-contained system, and that opened up a whole new world of challenges – on top of the intrinsic problem of developing a game that would be therapeutically useful and enjoyable for both children with and without arm impairments.
Below is the “rich picture” that I drew based on our interaction with schools. It isn't the whole story – I went on to expand it significantly based on subsequent interactions with children, parents and physiotherapists. This raised new concerns – the desire to win (there's no fun in playing a game when you already know you're going to be beaten) – anyone who's played a game against someone who's miles ahead of them. They all went into a version of the Rich Picture that's now lost to history. Well, to a reimaging of my PC's hard drive over the summer, at any rate. It didn't cross my mind that I might ever have need of it again!
Anyway, I'll spare you the details of the development that followed – except to say that the pain largely fell on Andy Weightman (now a lecturer at Manchester University), who was looking after the detail design, and Justin Gallagher, who was responsible for programming the game, and providing an adaptive algorithm that varied the amount of assistance provided based on a player's performance, as well as the input of undergraduate students from our Product Design and Mechanical Engineering courses.. Instead, I'll fast forward to the finished system, which now looks like this:
We also implemented four games, representing combinations of co-operative vs competitive play, and simultaneous vs sequential play, but all were based around the same basic plot: the player plays as a monkey who has to rescue his or her fellow monkeys from a hungry crocodile who plans to eat them for his tea, and the games represented some form of racing against the croc to rescue their friends.
You'll note that our ambitions for six players had to be rather scaled back! Nevertheless, there you have it: a self-contained unit that will allow children to play games that provide reach/retrieve exercise, through joysticks that offer power assistance to aid with a smooth trajectory. Both two player and single player versions exist (the single player version just has one of the joysticks and screens removed).
And it was this version that we took through to the participating schools. I'll save the outcomes for another post (hopefully in less than two months, this time!), but if you're really in a hurry to find out what happened next, we published a fairly detailed account in the Journal of Usability Studies:
“A System in the Wild: Deploying a Two Player Arm Rehabilitation System for Children With Cerebral Palsy in a School Environment” Raymond Holt, Andrew Weightman, Justin Gallagher, Nick Preston, Martin Levesley, Mark Mon-Williams, and Bipinchandra Bhakta; Journal of Usability Studies, Volume 8, Issue 4, August 2013, pp. 111 - 126
Enjoy!
Anyway, there's lots to say about that, but I'll save it for another time. For now, I wanted to recount a little more about our K005 rehabilitation joystick, especially since it got a plug from the Royal Society on Twitter today! This project was funded through the NIHR, who allocated it the code K005 - it's official title was "Novel interactive peer-group activity movement exercise (iP-GAME) System for children with Cerebral Palsy", which is quite a mouthful, so we always just called the project "K005". It was punchy, and we grew fond of it, even if it's a bit obscure to anyone who doesn't know the project! The system is known as hCAAR these days
I mentioned in my previous post, that I'd been brought on board a project to develop a home-based rehabilitation joystick by Professors Martin Levesley and Bipin Bhakta, whose brainchild the whole system is. We'd developed and tested a simple joystick to allow children to practice reach/retrieve type exercises at home, with power assistance to help guide them through an appropriate trajectory. The results were promising, but the children who participated indicated that they liked to play with friends. And so we were off, trying to extend the system to multiplayer games for use in a school environment.
This is much, much easier said than done. Originally, we had envisaged a set of standalone joysticks, where they could be plugged into any PC by USB, and the games played on them. They'd be portable, flexible (in use I mean – rather than physically bendy, which would have been interesting, but not much help!), easy to move and store... and you could get four or so of them attached to a computer, and a few friends could play together. What could go wrong?
Well, we've always adopted a user-centred approach to our design, so the first order of business was to visit schools, speak to teachers, look at the intended environment – and it quickly became obvious that our original idea wasn't going to work. Portable, plug-in joysticks were a lovely concept, but the teachers who we worked with pointed out that time was at a premium – they couldn't afford to have the class sat waiting for even a few minutes while they got joysticks out of cupboards, made space for them, plugged them in, and so on.
They wanted something self-contained: something that you could push a button on, and it would just work. That meant a self-contained system, and that opened up a whole new world of challenges – on top of the intrinsic problem of developing a game that would be therapeutically useful and enjoyable for both children with and without arm impairments.
Below is the “rich picture” that I drew based on our interaction with schools. It isn't the whole story – I went on to expand it significantly based on subsequent interactions with children, parents and physiotherapists. This raised new concerns – the desire to win (there's no fun in playing a game when you already know you're going to be beaten) – anyone who's played a game against someone who's miles ahead of them. They all went into a version of the Rich Picture that's now lost to history. Well, to a reimaging of my PC's hard drive over the summer, at any rate. It didn't cross my mind that I might ever have need of it again!
Anyway, I'll spare you the details of the development that followed – except to say that the pain largely fell on Andy Weightman (now a lecturer at Manchester University), who was looking after the detail design, and Justin Gallagher, who was responsible for programming the game, and providing an adaptive algorithm that varied the amount of assistance provided based on a player's performance, as well as the input of undergraduate students from our Product Design and Mechanical Engineering courses.. Instead, I'll fast forward to the finished system, which now looks like this:
We also implemented four games, representing combinations of co-operative vs competitive play, and simultaneous vs sequential play, but all were based around the same basic plot: the player plays as a monkey who has to rescue his or her fellow monkeys from a hungry crocodile who plans to eat them for his tea, and the games represented some form of racing against the croc to rescue their friends.
You'll note that our ambitions for six players had to be rather scaled back! Nevertheless, there you have it: a self-contained unit that will allow children to play games that provide reach/retrieve exercise, through joysticks that offer power assistance to aid with a smooth trajectory. Both two player and single player versions exist (the single player version just has one of the joysticks and screens removed).
And it was this version that we took through to the participating schools. I'll save the outcomes for another post (hopefully in less than two months, this time!), but if you're really in a hurry to find out what happened next, we published a fairly detailed account in the Journal of Usability Studies:
“A System in the Wild: Deploying a Two Player Arm Rehabilitation System for Children With Cerebral Palsy in a School Environment” Raymond Holt, Andrew Weightman, Justin Gallagher, Nick Preston, Martin Levesley, Mark Mon-Williams, and Bipinchandra Bhakta; Journal of Usability Studies, Volume 8, Issue 4, August 2013, pp. 111 - 126
Enjoy!
Monday, 7 October 2013
Where does the time go?
Well, I set out with the aim of posting fortnightly blog updates - and by my reckoning, that puts me exactly one month overdue. Whoops!
There have been a few reasons for that. Getting ready for the start of term, four research students in various stages of writing up (two now handed in, two to go in the next two months!), a plethora of grant deadlines - organising accreditation from the IED for our Product Design programme, visitors from the Ukraine, Georgia and Uzbekistan as part of the Engitech project... the back end of summer has been a busy, busy time! Well, at least it's interesting stuff. It might have been
And of course, a certain videogame has been released in the last month - you might have noticed.
I am referring, of course, to 22cans' "Godus" (why, was there another big videogame release in the last month? ;o)). I backed it through Kickstarter, and I've already had my money's worth, I can say. For someone who lost an unholy amount of their youth to Populous 2, the game is certainly compulsive! My excuse, of course, is that it's in Beta at the moment. 22cans need me!
Anyway, that's been sucking up a lot of the free time that I might otherwise have used to keep writing the blog (sorry). That, and I've been building a manipulandum out of Lego, cheap force sensors and a couple of National Instruments' MyDAQs (it's pretty swish - I'll post more about it in due course). I haven't even unpacked my Raspberry Pi camera module yet, despite having had it three weeks!
So, I'll be back with more information on my early adventures in inclusive play with the K005 project soon, and more of the output from the Together Through Play project (now in its closing stages!) - which the K005 stuff was meant to be a preamble to! And somewhere amongst that, I'm going to get all the formatting on this blog sorted out, and my LinkedIn and ResearchGate profiles and... well. We'll see.
But just to prove that I've been doing productive stuff with my time, feast your eyes on these pics:
It's a manipulandum - originally proposed by Johansson and Westling (1984) as a way of measuring fingertip forces during manipulation tasks. This one isn't intended for experimental use (it's made of Lego, after all!): rather, it's a concept demonstrator for testing the Honeywell force sensors I've been using. They're pretty good, actually - and at £50 each, pretty reasonably priced, and very compact compared to those you might spend a few hundred or thousand pounds on. My hope is that this will be the basis of small fleet of devices we can deploy in our school-based projects. Not made of Lego, obviously - Lego structures are just a bit too prone to exploding when too much force is applied (though, in fairness, they're easy to repair, so maybe Lego kit isn't quite as crazy as it sounds!). But this is a concept demonstrator. The one shown here is the early prototype: it'll measure finger and thumb forces (which will be roughly equal and opposite in a straight lift). The version I'm currently working on will do thumb, forefinger and middle finger forces, as well as measuring the vertical load force.
But that's a tale for another time!
References
Westling, G. & Johansson, R. S. (1984). Factors influencing the force control during precision grip. Experimental Brain Research, 53, 277-284
There have been a few reasons for that. Getting ready for the start of term, four research students in various stages of writing up (two now handed in, two to go in the next two months!), a plethora of grant deadlines - organising accreditation from the IED for our Product Design programme, visitors from the Ukraine, Georgia and Uzbekistan as part of the Engitech project... the back end of summer has been a busy, busy time! Well, at least it's interesting stuff. It might have been
And of course, a certain videogame has been released in the last month - you might have noticed.
I am referring, of course, to 22cans' "Godus" (why, was there another big videogame release in the last month? ;o)). I backed it through Kickstarter, and I've already had my money's worth, I can say. For someone who lost an unholy amount of their youth to Populous 2, the game is certainly compulsive! My excuse, of course, is that it's in Beta at the moment. 22cans need me!
Anyway, that's been sucking up a lot of the free time that I might otherwise have used to keep writing the blog (sorry). That, and I've been building a manipulandum out of Lego, cheap force sensors and a couple of National Instruments' MyDAQs (it's pretty swish - I'll post more about it in due course). I haven't even unpacked my Raspberry Pi camera module yet, despite having had it three weeks!
So, I'll be back with more information on my early adventures in inclusive play with the K005 project soon, and more of the output from the Together Through Play project (now in its closing stages!) - which the K005 stuff was meant to be a preamble to! And somewhere amongst that, I'm going to get all the formatting on this blog sorted out, and my LinkedIn and ResearchGate profiles and... well. We'll see.
But just to prove that I've been doing productive stuff with my time, feast your eyes on these pics:
It's a manipulandum - originally proposed by Johansson and Westling (1984) as a way of measuring fingertip forces during manipulation tasks. This one isn't intended for experimental use (it's made of Lego, after all!): rather, it's a concept demonstrator for testing the Honeywell force sensors I've been using. They're pretty good, actually - and at £50 each, pretty reasonably priced, and very compact compared to those you might spend a few hundred or thousand pounds on. My hope is that this will be the basis of small fleet of devices we can deploy in our school-based projects. Not made of Lego, obviously - Lego structures are just a bit too prone to exploding when too much force is applied (though, in fairness, they're easy to repair, so maybe Lego kit isn't quite as crazy as it sounds!). But this is a concept demonstrator. The one shown here is the early prototype: it'll measure finger and thumb forces (which will be roughly equal and opposite in a straight lift). The version I'm currently working on will do thumb, forefinger and middle finger forces, as well as measuring the vertical load force.
But that's a tale for another time!
References
Westling, G. & Johansson, R. S. (1984). Factors influencing the force control during precision grip. Experimental Brain Research, 53, 277-284
Saturday, 24 August 2013
The Project Formerly Known as K005...
It's been another busy fortnight in Leeds. Fifteen days, in fact,
if you're counting (and I am - I'm like that). You'd think that
things would calm down over the summer, but they stay as busy ever!
I keep promising myself that I'll get round to sorting the formatting on this blog - and getting my ResearchGate profile up to date, and getting a LinkedIn profile together... Ah, well. One step at a time.
I was going to say something more about the Together Through Play project, but I guess before I start drilling down into the detail, I should probably say something about my other research, and how TTP (as it's affectionately known) fits into the rest of my work.
I got interested in the issue of inclusive play through the work I was doing with Professors Martin Levesley and Bipin Bhakta here at the University of Leeds on upper limb rehabilitation. This is high up in my mind at the moment, because we've just published a paper in the Journal of Usability Studies [1] outlining our experiences!
The project was funded by the National Institute for Health Research, under the title “Novel Interactive Peer Group Activity Movement Exercise”. We had intended this to abbreviate to iP-GAME, but it was always easier to refer to it by the code assigned to it by the NIHR, which was K005. The project ran from 2008 to 2012, so in fact, it overlapped a fair bit with Together Through Play. But let's dial back a bit further.
The whole project was based on the principle of assisted arm exercise: the idea that for children with upper limb impairments due to cerebral palsy, their motor skills can be improved significantly by regular practice, and that practice can be even more effective if it receives guidance. It's a principle that we've applied with stroke patients as well, and it replicates the sort of activity that a physiotherapist would carry out with a patient. The thing is that physiotherapists are in short supply in the NHS and often patients have to supplement the time they get with a home exercise plan. This got Martin and Bipin interested in developing robotic systems that could provide the kind of support offered by a physio, but in the home. And since the sort of reach/retrieve exercise prescribed for these home exercise plans is dull and repetitive, it seemed logical to give the whole thing a game interface, and they had received an NIHR grant (this one by the catchy code “G006”) to develop a powered joystick that would provide the kind of supported exercise described above by playing a videogame.
This sort of Interactive Computer Play-based therapy (ICP-based therapy) is a hot topic with the Wii, and the Kinect – though this grant was back in 2006, before either arrived on the scene – back when the PlayStation 2's EyeToy (remember those?) was the only kid on the motion controller block. This was where I was brought on board, to help with the User testing and to lead the user-centered design of the games. So, the joysticks and games were duly constructed (by Andrew Weightman, now a lecturer at Manchester Met) and deployed in children's homes for evaluation – you can find more detail in our Journal of Engineering Design paper on the subject [2].
Anyway, the results were promising, but the children who helped with the evaluation told us that really, they played videogames as a social activity, and they wanted a game they could share with their friends. And that was the motivation behind K005, and the “peer group” part of the activity. I mean, multiplayer games – how hard could it be? Well, I'll spare the details for next time, but though I didn't know it at the time, I was taking my first steps on the path of inclusive play...
References
[1] Holt RJ, Weightman APH, GallagherJF, Preston NJ, Levesley MC, Mon-Williams M, Bhakta B (2013) A System in the Wild: Deploying a Two Player Arm Rehabilitation System for Children With Cerebral Palsy in a School Environment. Journal of Usability Studies pp. 111-126
[2] Weightman APH, Preston N, Holt RJ, Allsop MJ, Levesley MC, Bhakta B (2010) Engaging children in healthcare technology design: developing rehabilitation technology for children with cerebral palsy. Journal of Engineering Design 21 (5), 579-600
I keep promising myself that I'll get round to sorting the formatting on this blog - and getting my ResearchGate profile up to date, and getting a LinkedIn profile together... Ah, well. One step at a time.
I was going to say something more about the Together Through Play project, but I guess before I start drilling down into the detail, I should probably say something about my other research, and how TTP (as it's affectionately known) fits into the rest of my work.
I got interested in the issue of inclusive play through the work I was doing with Professors Martin Levesley and Bipin Bhakta here at the University of Leeds on upper limb rehabilitation. This is high up in my mind at the moment, because we've just published a paper in the Journal of Usability Studies [1] outlining our experiences!
The project was funded by the National Institute for Health Research, under the title “Novel Interactive Peer Group Activity Movement Exercise”. We had intended this to abbreviate to iP-GAME, but it was always easier to refer to it by the code assigned to it by the NIHR, which was K005. The project ran from 2008 to 2012, so in fact, it overlapped a fair bit with Together Through Play. But let's dial back a bit further.
The whole project was based on the principle of assisted arm exercise: the idea that for children with upper limb impairments due to cerebral palsy, their motor skills can be improved significantly by regular practice, and that practice can be even more effective if it receives guidance. It's a principle that we've applied with stroke patients as well, and it replicates the sort of activity that a physiotherapist would carry out with a patient. The thing is that physiotherapists are in short supply in the NHS and often patients have to supplement the time they get with a home exercise plan. This got Martin and Bipin interested in developing robotic systems that could provide the kind of support offered by a physio, but in the home. And since the sort of reach/retrieve exercise prescribed for these home exercise plans is dull and repetitive, it seemed logical to give the whole thing a game interface, and they had received an NIHR grant (this one by the catchy code “G006”) to develop a powered joystick that would provide the kind of supported exercise described above by playing a videogame.
This sort of Interactive Computer Play-based therapy (ICP-based therapy) is a hot topic with the Wii, and the Kinect – though this grant was back in 2006, before either arrived on the scene – back when the PlayStation 2's EyeToy (remember those?) was the only kid on the motion controller block. This was where I was brought on board, to help with the User testing and to lead the user-centered design of the games. So, the joysticks and games were duly constructed (by Andrew Weightman, now a lecturer at Manchester Met) and deployed in children's homes for evaluation – you can find more detail in our Journal of Engineering Design paper on the subject [2].
Anyway, the results were promising, but the children who helped with the evaluation told us that really, they played videogames as a social activity, and they wanted a game they could share with their friends. And that was the motivation behind K005, and the “peer group” part of the activity. I mean, multiplayer games – how hard could it be? Well, I'll spare the details for next time, but though I didn't know it at the time, I was taking my first steps on the path of inclusive play...
References
[1] Holt RJ, Weightman APH, GallagherJF, Preston NJ, Levesley MC, Mon-Williams M, Bhakta B (2013) A System in the Wild: Deploying a Two Player Arm Rehabilitation System for Children With Cerebral Palsy in a School Environment. Journal of Usability Studies pp. 111-126
[2] Weightman APH, Preston N, Holt RJ, Allsop MJ, Levesley MC, Bhakta B (2010) Engaging children in healthcare technology design: developing rehabilitation technology for children with cerebral palsy. Journal of Engineering Design 21 (5), 579-600
Friday, 9 August 2013
Playday!
Wednesday just
gone (the 7th) was Playday (http://www.playday.org.uk/),
the “national day for play”! Last year, which was the first time
I'd ever heard of Playday, we at the Together Through Play team
(which is a grand way of saying “Angharad, Anne-Marie and I”)
said “We must do something for that next year...”.
Whether they will materialise, remains to be seen – many a slip twixt cup and lip, and I've been in academia long enough not to count my chickens before they hatch, (not to mention acquiring a natty collection of stock phrases!). Hopefully a year gives us good time to get things together – or for everyone to forget I mentioned this if it all comes to naught...
Well, we didn't. Apart from anything
else, August's a tough time for organising something ourselves,
because all the kids we work with are on school holiday, and because
these things don't half take a lot of organising (and I doff my cap
to anyone who organised one of the many events going on for this
year!). Next year, though... well, next year might be different.
We've given ourselves more time this time (*more* than a year, you
see), and we're aiming to hook up with an external partner who knows
a thing or two about organising summer time play events. So suffice
to say, plans are afoot.
Whether they will materialise, remains to be seen – many a slip twixt cup and lip, and I've been in academia long enough not to count my chickens before they hatch, (not to mention acquiring a natty collection of stock phrases!). Hopefully a year gives us good time to get things together – or for everyone to forget I mentioned this if it all comes to naught...
Just two more things:
Inclusive Play have run a survey on,
er, Inclusive Play to celebrate Playday:
http://www.inclusiveplay.com/playday-survey-2013/
And I've been spending the
last few weeks playing around with a Raspberry Pi, PyGame, switch
controls and PiFace – it's been a lot of fun, and I look forward to
sharing the results...
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