A Playday Post Mortem (part 1)

Hmmm... that title looks alarming like some sort of murder mystery. But here I mean post mortem in the "project review" sense. It seemed like a good time to draw a line under Together Through Play, and since Playday was pure Grand finale,  I thought it would be a good time to review what went right, what went wrong,  and what I've learned for the future. As ever, let's start with the "What was good", before "What could have been better" (you can tell I've done a teaching certificate,  eh? ). Time is short today,  so I'll do what was good today,  and the improvements in my next post.

What was Good

1) That we did it at all.  That's my number one.  It was great to actually show our work of and talk to the public about it. It was great to see the reactions we got,  even the unexpected problems ( as we shall see next post!). I always enjoy showing off what we're doing.  Partly because I'm a show-off, but also because I like to know whether what I'm doing actually means something.

2) Taking a trial run that morning. I'd made some late improvements to the Button Bash code on my laptop. Upon copying it back to the Windows tablet we were using, it wouldn't run at all. I found this out when I did one last check on the morning before setting off. The problem was the number of the COM port for the arduino in the code. Trivial,  easily corrected,  but a headache,  and it would have beem a load more hassle trying to fix during set up. I've demo'd enough kiss to know that you should always test on the morning!

3) Charging the Tablet beforehand.  There was a delay in getting power to us.  In the end it got sorted out in good time before starting,  but knowing I had two hours' charge on the tablet meant there was no stress at all. We had a buffer, even if we didn't need it.

4) Bright posters, bunting and horsey seats. These were courtesy of Sinead Dumigan, one of my Product Design students who supplied the graphics for the game. When you're working on a game,  it's easy to focus on what's on the screen.  You forget that from even four feet away, or just looks like a tablet. Add the posters, bunting and horse seats, and you suddenly have something that looks interesting from a distance and pulls people in.

These were the good.  But what could we have done better?  Tune in next time!

PhD studentship in rehabilitation of grip function

In case you're interested, I've got a potential PhD Studentship up for grabs on Development of a Biofeedback Device to Restore Grasp Function in Individuals with Spinal Cord Injury (click on the link to go the application page!).

This is co-supervised by Drs Sarah Astill and Rachel Coates over in Sports and Exercise Science. Well co-supervised by Rachel Coates and me since Sarah is the lead supervisor!

Anyway, this will look at extending the work I've been doing on the manipulandum to measure grip forces (currently being refined and souped by the outstanding Stuart Watt, a phenomenal undergraduate here at Leeds - thanks to the financial generosity of National Instruments who have sponsored the work!), and developing it to provide feedback to aid the recovery of grip function in individuals with Spinal Cord Injury.

It's a 3.5 year studentship funded via EPSRC, preferred start date is this October, but could be delayed as far as April 2015. The deadline for applications is the 29th of August (two weeks tomorrow - yeah, I know. I know.) Most importantly, it's a super-exciting area for us to be moving into, and I'm champing at the bit to get the manipulandum doing more than just measuring, and actually building in the therapeutic functions. Help me out, people - let's get this show on the road!

I came, I saw, I... played

Or rather, we came, we saw, and we played - since Playday was as much work for Anne-Marie Moore (PhD researcher on Together Through Play) as it was for me.

Anyway, we made it through Playday without the Button Bash kit breaking or the solder giving out, or Windows crashing - or the (at times torrential!) rain stopping play. And I'm bushed. Who knew Play was such hard work? :op 

A lot of fun, though - pics are up on Twitter (You can find me on @rayjholt). Not many of the kit in use (just one, I think). There wasn't much time to grab them. I'd started the day with the idea that I'd be providing a steady stream of Tweets, but that really didn't happen. It's telling that the tweets cover the set up - and then the back end of the day! I soon discovered that trying to "live tweet" an event by taking photos and then posting twitter from your phone makes you look a) anti-social and b) a bit creepy, since the people you've just photographed don't really know what you're doing. 

Anyway, I'll try to get a proper post-mortem of what went well and what we could have improved (you can tell I'm a lecturer, eh?) up here in the next few days. For now, I'm off to have a rest - by getting back to the day job.

Playday Approaches...

Next Wednesday (6th of August) is Playday 2014 - the official day of play! To celebrate, and we've actually got ourselves organised, and arranged to take one of the Together Through Play games, Button Bash, down to the Breeze on Tour event at Roundhay Park.  If you're in the area, feel free to say hello!

In the meantime, to whet your appetite, here's a screen shot, and a photo of the whole system:

I'll see you there!

Hello (again) world!

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!

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.

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!
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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!