2015: A Year of Two Halves

I know, I know: every year has two halves. But the 29th of June 2015 was a turning point in a year of two very contrasting halves. You can see that in the pattern of posts on this blog. Six in the first six months, and 17 in the latter. I was ill almost continuously between Christmas 2014 and the middle of May. So the first six months were more or less a write off. The second half, however paid off nicely: it’s nice to be able to end the year on a high note.

   I was going to review the year against the goals I set out in January, but looking back, I see that I never got round to setting any. That’s the kind of start to the year I had! So I’ll just look back at the main headlines of the year:

FATKAT: This was a big year for FATKAT, when we actually used it in anger for the first time, and it progressed from a couple of manipulandums to a full suite of software that can capture, calibrate and filter data. Naturally, everything about it had to be refined: software was rewritten from scratch, hardware changed as components proved unsatisfactory or redundant. We got it running with QualiSys There’s still a lot more to do. The original 3D printed prototypes are wearing out, and a more robust build is needed. The amplifier circuitry needs a box. The accelerometers may need upgrading, though this is part of the pressing need for a more modular design. So, lots to do, but largely because we’ve learned a lot.

WHISPER: The year closed out with a new project funded by the Department for Transport in conjunction with Bryan Matthews (of the Institute for Transport Studies and the Centre for Disabilities) and Brian Henson (also of iDRO), where we’ll be looking at wearable haptic navigation aids for visually impaired pedestrians. It’s a small grant for a short project (December to March), but it’ll allow us to do some important groundwork on investigating user needs and haptic communication to underpin bigger grants in future. It’s also given me a welcome excuse to dust off my Arduino and get making! It’ll be a good one!
Commercialisation: A classic problem with academic blogging (which I’m sure hits company blogs to boot) is that you don’t want to show your hand too soon, for fear that competitors will steal a march on you. That means cryptic references until work is published. Still, there’s been some exciting progress on the postural sway work we’ve been doing which is bearing fruit.

Prehension: This is my main passion, and I’ve been really pleased with the progress we’ve made. I’ve been developing a model of reach-to-grasp movements with Rachel Coats and Mark Mon-Williams over in Psychology. Again, I’m reluctant to say a lot till we’ve got papers out about it, but we’ve had a paper accepted for the CWUAAT 2016 conference that gives the big picture.

Stepping Down as Product Design Programme Manager: Probably the biggest change this year was stepping down as Programme Manager for Product Design after 8 years at the helm. I didn’t do quite everything I wanted (accreditation!), but I made some real changes to the course, saw it through some tricky times (Cuts! Fees! Staff changes! Changes to the whole way the course is run! Changes in entry standard and course space – to name a few!), and we topped the Guardian League Table for Product Design. The last one is down to the fantastic Product Design team we have – and I think I’ve left the programme in a stronger and more stable position than when I took over.

Other than that, I’ve tripled my number of invitations to act as an external PhD examiner. Admittedly, that takes my number to three (one of which will take place next year), but still. I’ve also been added to  the CWUAAT programme committee, taking the place of the much-missed Bipin Bhakta.

My only real disappointment is that when I went off sick, the impetus was lost on the collaboration with Calderdale Council following on from the 2014 Hack the Home event in Halifax. Which is a shame: the team delivered some really good concepts. In fact, overall this year has been heavy on the science and light on the inclusive design and assistive technology side. One for the future, I think: it's part of the reason I'm so excited about WHISPER.

Outside work, I’ve made a point of tinkering more. I’ve joined Leeds Hackspace (which is excellent), and had various Kickstarters pay-off: Codebug, Flotilla and Onion Omega. I’ve got my Raspberry Pi rig pretty much up and running with touchscreen and Pi Cam. I don’t have much to show for this playing around, but it’s certainly expanded my knowledge of different hardware and software libraries, which is good.

And what of the blog? Two and a half years in, it’s not perfect, but I think the move towards weekly (or nearly weekly!)  updates was a good one. There isn’t always much to say, but I think short regular updates are better than several months’ gap. I’d like to make some more changes next year – but that’s for the next post. I’ll start next year with a post year.
So, a good year in the end, despite the shaky start. Here’s to 2016!

Deck the Halls and Clear the Desk...

Well, that's me done for 2015. The University has shut up shop, and I have spent the day doing my best to clear my To Do list. I was going to say clear my desk, but given my natural tendency towards piling, that would be rather ironic. I didn't clear everything, anyway: eventually some things had to be put off till 2016, but I'll be coming back to a clean enough slate.

Anyway, I wanted to take a look back at this year, both personally and from the perspective of this blog - but I'll leave that for next week. I'm off to put my feet up: have a good one!

The End of the End. Of term.

And so, term ends. Not teaching, though: marking still remains to be done, and project students are still around. Still, it is much reduced. The temptation is to drop it all,  head back to research: get on with developing new ideas - but that's unwise. This is a funny time, with Christmas not far off, and only 8 working days left. It's a better time for drawing a line,  finishing tasks off, rather than starting afresh.

Of course, it's not like research hasn't been going on. We've just had a proposal to the DfT funded to do research on wearable haptic aids for navigation. It's only a small grant, but it'll let us lay the groundwork for larger grants by exploring user needs. We've also got two journal  papers nearly in: one on interceptive movents in children, and one on reach-to-grasp movements. None of which I can expand on here until they're accepted, but with a bit of luck, I'll be able to outline or thinking once it's all under peer review.

There's plenty to do over the next two weeks, but it's all bits and pieces. I'll try to get up a Year in Review post before Christmas. Until then: have fun!

22nd November: Peak Teach

Did I say these posts were getting biweekly? Make that monthly at the rate I'm going! The reason for this is a phrase that's cropped up a lot recently: Peak Teach.

If late October is the calm before the storm,  November is the storm. Projects are in full swing and students need feedback on their proposals, assignments are in for marking, new assignments are being set, and lots of "extra" lectures hit around this time (the one-off ethics sessions and practicals). Last week, I had nine hours of lectures, two of tutorials,  and seven of project supervision. Plus marking. And everything else doesn't go away: I've put a grant proposal in to the DoT,  examined a PhD at Sheffield, written my paper for CWUAAT 2016 (a last minute change from 3-page poster outline to 9-page full paper at the reviewers' invitation: a real boon, but a lot of work), had two new PhD students start, and one pass his transfer viva and head off to start fieldwork. And two students who need feedback on their theses by the end of the month.

Not that I'm complaining - it's all interesting stuff and it all moves things forwards - but the blog posts for the last month would all have been exactly the same. There's a little progress on lots of things, rather than big things getting steadily ticked off! But such are the rhythms of academic life, and I've long since learned to live with it. I keep my home diary clear,  so I can actually rest when I'm not working or parenting, and new things have to wait for the end of term.

The next three weeks will be similar,  so I daresay I'll be putting up a similar post in another three weeks for the merry old end of term! I'll see you then!

12th and 19th Oct: The End of the Beginning

Yup, these posts are definitely looking more fortnightly than weekly! I keep meaning to write some more specific posts, and get some images in - but hey, given some of the lengthy gaps in posts I had in the early days  (or, ahem, the first couple of years), I'll settle for getting an update in every couple of weeks!

It's a funny time of year. Every time of year is funny/odd/busy/exciting in some way, but Week 4 of teaching (for that's what this is here at Leeds) definitely stands out as one of the more unusual. I think of it as the End of the Beginning. Hence the post title.

See, the start of the year is busy: modules to be set, projects to be allocated and started, lectures given, teething problems addressed - all against the ongoing background of research. The end of this term and start of next will also be very busy: the end of year will be exceptionally busy. Of course it will: every level 3 and 4 student must be examined, every piece of coursework assessed, mitigating circumstances allowed for, marks aggregated by the Exam Boards or absolute chaos will ensue.

But this week is an interesting point: exams have been written, coursework set, projects started: all the early effort required to build momentum. And coursework hasn't yet arrived for marking. Just for a moment, there's a lull and this afternoon I actually ran out of things to do.

Which isn't to say there aren't things on my To Do list, but I've finished reading the Thesis I'll be examining next week; I've interviewed three prospective PhD students and got their research proposals finalised; I've finished reviewing papers for next year's  CWUAAT conference. There are plenty of things to pick up next week, but in the last chunk of Friday afternoon, there's no sense starting them.

Next week a raft of new things begin - research proposals picked back up; a paper to write; a journal article to review. Still, it's nice to appreciate the odd moments of calm when they come along.

28th Sept and 5th Oct: Groundwork

These weekly updates are starting to get more like fortnightly, aren't they? Well, such us the way - especially in the first few weeks of teaching. There's never a time that's not busy, of course, but this time of year is particularly hectic. Lectures have to be delivered, projects allocated, detaiks checked. Lecture Capture isn't available in the lecture theatre I'm teaching Mechanical Systems in this year, so I'm trying to make last year's lectures available through our virtual learning environment. Doable, and worth doing, but it's never trivial.

Likewise, I've been grappling with LabVIEW's simulation and control module. A great system, but apparently corrupted on my version of LabVIEW 2013. After much ado, I installed LabVIEW 2015, and that's working a treat.  Also, trying to sort out an external live brief has been hard work. Companies tend to assume that your time is free, while theirs has value - so will merrily chop and change things, then complain when you won't rearrange the timetable at the last minute, despite the fact that this has enormous repercussions for admin staff, lecturers and students who don't stand to benefit. Sometimes you have to stand your ground, even if it makes you unpopular.

Technical difficulties and a couple of days of sick and carer leave aside, work has been mostly good, if rather routine: we're just getting to the stage where we're moving from introducing, setting up and clarifying to getting to the interesting stuff: solving problems and reviewing designs.

Two high points have  been writing an exam (I enjoy finding practical case studies of mechanisms and posing myself the questions), and preparing to act as external examiner for a PhD viva. Reading a thesis is always thought provoking, and gets you thinking deeply about a subject.

So, lots on - and it's all good stuff,  even if the main achievements are things like "Set up the VLE", " Set assignment", "delivered introductory lecture". None are ground breaking, or exceptional - but you get nothing done if you don't do these first.

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!

W/c 17th August: Curves, KATs and more curves

This image pretty much sums up my week. For the most part, I've stared at LabVIEW graphs of curves being fitted: and that's about it. There are good reasons for this, though I won’t give out too much detail, since we'll need to hold that back for the publications. And a lot of it has been debugging code and rethinking models.

I had a particularly nasty bug where LABVIEW fitted a lovely curve, but returned a denominator which would always be zero in the output spreadsheet. I went through the code time and again. It all seemed right. When I tried it on one file at a time (writing output to the screen) it worked fine. Process a batch in one go and the summary spreadsheet returned the same impissible zeroes. Loads of them. Not all the time, but a lot. Yet some results matched perfectly with the individual runs.

And the solution, of course, was trivial: I'd set LabVIEW to write the spreadsheet to 3 decimal places. So 0.0006 showed up as 0.001 (close enough), but 0.0004 showed up as 0 - not 0.000, just 0. One character replaced and the problem was solved.

It was worth it, though - it all seems to be coming together, and after weeks of investigating and rethinking, we are (to quote my colleague Mark Mon-Williams) "on the verge of something big".

It was a week where I did little else. But just as you have some weeks where you do much but get little done, the payoff is that you get some weeks where you do little, but get a lot done! So, revised electronics for FATKAT are finished and tested (and they work!), a prospective avenue for taking some Bayesian analysis into oilfield corrosion (a door I've been pushing on for a little while now) has opened up, and I had a very productive meeting with JCM seating on the postural front. So there's lots of good news this week.

Not every week can be like that, of course, but I'm hopeful that next week will see some important developments. Stay tuned!

w/c 10th August: Curve Fitting, Coding and Commercialisation

It's been a short week this week, since I've been off two days providing childcare during the summer holidays, but there's been a lot of progress. The week kicked off with a meeting with Brian Henson and visiting researcher Miyong Lee to look into some experiments on weight perception using FATKAT. This is exciting - having actually made the system, it's good to be getting as much use out of it as we can! I also had a meeting with Will Shaw to discuss the priorities for his upcoming studies, particularly in terms of the new version of FATKAT we're building. I have a couple of priorities for rebuilding the electronics next week, so Will's study can get underway, whereas the new casings we've designed can wait. All good stuff.

I also had a productive meeting with our Research and Innovation Services chaps and external consultants about commercialising some of Ian Flatters' work. Again, very exciting - but also hush hush, since we don't want to give details away.

But most of the week has been spent writing and debugging LabVIEW code for fitting Gaussian peaks to velocity profiles for reach-to-grasp actions. As to why, I'll explain in due course - but suffice to say there's been an awful lot of building and rebuilding code to make it more modular, teasing out why particular bugs crop up (missing markers return a value of 37, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000. Put that as a step change through a butterworth filter, and you get some very bizarre results.  Then there's breaking the actual reach-to-grasp movement down into its component parts - how do we differentiate where feedforward ends and feedback kicks in? Anyway, it's mostly done now - the technical bits are in place: next week I can focus on the actually analysing data. Hurrah!

Week in Review : 3rd August

It's been a funny old week this week. I've done much, but finished little. That's largely because I've dedicated most of my time to data analysis on old reach-to-grasp experiments. That's meant a lot of debugging code, picking through data to see where problems have arisen, and refreshing my knowledge of curve fitting and Gaussian functions. On the one hand, I don't have anything concrete to show for it. On the other, I've overcome a bunch of technical hurdles and I'm in a position to do more constructive work this week - touch wood.

Of course, there's been more than that - PhD supervision, teaching is back on my agenda, so timetables have been debated, handouts sent for printing, and project outlines prepared. And I've been steadily assembling parts for the next FATKAT. Of course, I'm only in three days next week - so I may be writing an exciting update, or reporting more delays.

   It's also been a year since we took Button Bash to Breeze on Tour for Playday! Happy times. I'm sad not to be doing anything for it this year - but given how things worked out, I'm also rather glad. But next year... who knows?

End of an era: stepping down as Product Design Programme Manager

This is my first blog post of the 2015/16 academic year, and my first as ex-Programme Manager for the MDes, BSc Product Design course here in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Leeds. This is less dramatic than it sounds: I haven't changed jobs, I'm still teaching the same modules and the same tutorial groups, and the same dissertation projects. In fact, the students who aren't Student Reps won't notice a lot of difference. But it's a big deal for me, so I wanted to pause and reflect on what it means, what I've learned, and where I (and Product Design) go next.

My First Big Commission

Being a Lecturer in the School of Mechanical Engineering is the only job I've ever had (if you don't count an industrial placement year and summer work at Knoll Pharmaceuticals in my pre-doctorate days). I started the post in September 2005 at the tender age of 26, before I'd even completed my PhD: the first lecturer appointed uniquely to the Product Design course. There had already been a Professor (Pat Jordan) and teaching fellows appointed: but still, I was the first lecturer. Product Design (affectionately known as PDES after its course code) was still young: it had started in 2003, and wouldn't graduate its first students until the end of my first year in post. It was a faculty-wide initiative, involved staff from all the in the Faculty of Engineering, and staff from other faculties to boot. It was an unusual mix of art and engineering - most design courses are either engineering-focused with some art, or art-focused with some engineering. Our USP was to aim straight down the middle - an even balance of both, and an investigation of the links between them. The goal wasn't to drawn in engineers, but to address the shortage of technical skills by providing a route for those from a more creative background to acquire them. We were feeling our way in the early days - rapidly iterating, finding out what worked and what didn't. Getting new resources. I was almost immediately given the job of looking after PDES admissions, running open days, reading UCAS forms, making decisions on borderline cases. Just less than two years later, in August 2007, I was made Programme Manager for Product Design, stepping in to fill the shoes of Alison McKay, who had steered the course through its inception and its first full round of graduates. The course was bedding in, the rapid evolution slowing down, and the time had come to rotate the leadership, and the job fell to me. In two years, I'd gone from an inexperienced and unqualified teacher to leading the Programme. It was the most responsibility I'd ever been given - and in my professional capacity, it still is.

Times of Change

My greatest fear was that I would somehow shipwreck the course. I didn't - it's still here, it's topped the Guardian League table for Product Design, and I've seen more than 250 students right through from recruitment to graduation in my time as Programme Manager, with a student satisfaction rate of over 90%, and student employment rates that are on a par with our engineering courses. I reckon I've done okay and while managing a degree programme is never easy, it's fascinating how things I once found daunting (chairing a theme team, managing a budget, responding to student feedback) are now things I take fro granted.
   It hasn't all been plain sailing though, and the course has had to evolve a lot in that time. When we had our tenth anniversary celebration, bringing in graduates new and old to talk about their time on the course and beyond, I reflected on how the course we taught in 2013 was very different from the one set up in 2003. I think there are only about five modules on the whole programme that have stayed the same during my tenure as Programme Manager. Then again in 2023, the course will look different again. It has to: times change, and academia is all about adaptation.
   My time in charge has been characterised by the need to adapt. You might recall that 2007 was just before the world economy fell off a cliff, and budgets had to be cut - in 2010, the University shed 10% of its staff, and 20% of its non-staff budgets. That meant a lot of rationalisation. What do we really, really need to teach? Not what's cheap - what's the best use of our money? Then £9k fees arrived, core and margin recruitment, the need to tighten entry standards, and run a smaller course of high-calibre students.
   Most significantly, as I came into the role, the course was moved from being one that was Faculty wide, to one housed within Mechanical Engineering. The difference to the students was cosmetic, but administratively, it meant aligning budgets, software needs, teaching practices, the staff student forum, exam boards - we've gradually aligned modules, shifted from buying in modules elsewhere to delivering them ourselves, so we could ensure their suitability for our students.
   If I have one achievement of which I'm most proud, it's that I've moved the course from being an anomaly, an outsider, to an integrated part of the department, without losing its distinctive feel. That's not been easy, and the credit can't go to me alone - we're a good team, and we've been blessed with some good managers during the transition. Martin Levesley, as Director of Student Education during most of my run and the biggest period of change; Dave Barton as Head of School; Mark Wilson as the admissions tutor during the turbulent recruitment changes; and Victoria Price as our marketing director - all were hugely supportive in keeping PDES as a design course, rather than trying to water the vision down into "engineering with a bit of design".

 Goodbye Yellow Brick

So why go now? There are a few good reasons. One of them is that eight years is a long time to do a single role. It provides continuity, and I don't think I could have stepped down sooner without leaving a lot of loose ends in the whole integration. But that's done now, and there's a danger of getting too wedded to your own changes. Also, a fresh perspective is always helpful, and the challenges facing the course are changing. Its no longer about stability, and rationalisation, and integration - it's about how we move forwards, and how we engage with the new opportunities presented by university initiatives such as the Discovery Themes (the new approach we take to deliver electives). Lots of exciting opportunities, but I think we'll benefit from having a fresh pair of eyes looking at them. Also, the programme has been run by an engineer for the last eight years, and we've sorted out the engineering side of it - the opportunities now are about the creative side, and someone from a design background is far better place than I to do that. So the course feels like its at a natural turning point, a good time to transition, rather than starting new initiatives.
   Then, of course, there's FATKAT (the Finger and Thumb Kinetic Assessment Tool, in case you don't keep tabs on what I'm doing) and all the grip and posture research. I had exactly one Phd student when I started as Programme Manager. Now I have seven, in varies stages of their degrees. I have a commercialisation project under way - that takes time. Links with Born in Bradford, with JCM seating - they all need to be cultivated. We have models that need to be developed and explored if we're to publish them in time for the next REF. And FATKAT needs nurturing at the moment - it's ready to use, but funders want to see results, and more development before they'll put money into it. We have to speculate to accumulate, as it were, and I can't give FATKAT and PDES the attention they both deserve. So, again, it's a natural time for me to shift gears, so while it's not off to pastures new, it's the end of one era, and the dawn of another.
   I'm excited. Strangely, I'm not sure I'll miss running PDES - I feel like I achieved what I set out to do with it, and now is a time to end on a high note, rather than set myself new goals for the course. It's a natural time to go, and with the inestimable Dan Trowsdale taking over, I know the course is in good hands.

The Best Laid Plans

Of course, I didn't get quite the end I'd hoped for. My recent illness meant that for the last three months of my tenure, Dan was already de facto manager for PDES. So, my hopes for a stirring speech at our exhibition or graduation, didn't come to pass. Indeed, looking back through my emails, I see that my final official pronouncement as programme leader was "Yup, looks good to me!". Ah well, such is the way of things. And of course, I haven't actually gone anywhere - it's not like I've changed jobs. I have just one regret; that I didn't finish steering PDES through the accreditation process. There's a raft of documentation that's been sat on my desk for six months, as ill-health chipped into my time, and higher priority matters took up the time I had left. Still, you can't do everything: I'm better, I'm steadily ramping up my hours (75% of full time and counting!), and my focus for the immediate future is everything grip related. Product Design is in safe hands, so here's to a FATKAT future!

Week in Review: 27th July

It's been a productive week, despite the school holidays meaning I was only in three days. This week, we managed to get an NIHR proposal submitted, a forthcoming EPSRC proposal reviewed and off my desk (I'm a co-Investigator in both cases, so I can't take all the credit, but I've put a good few hours in in each!), I've had a very exciting meeting with Khemeia consulting about commercialising some of my work (details are confidential but it's all exciting).

The main achievement though, has been writing LabVIEW code to automatically process kinematic data from 1620 optotrak files of reach-to-grasp movements. The aim is to see if the model Mark Mon-Williams and I have come up with for pre-contact movements is supported by the data. I've got all working, I'm pleased to say: next week, I just need to identify suitable initial parameters for curve-fitting, and I should be able to test our hypothesis... I'm excited!

And on a side note, today was my last day as Programme Manager for Product Design, after eight years in the role. Not that it meant much in practice: Having been ill for most of the last three months, I've been de facto out of the role since April, and of course, by July, virtually all the admin work is under the bridge. Still, it's been a big part of my job for the last eight years  (80% of my time as an academic, nearly a quarter of my life and fully two thirds of the time the course has existed!), so I thought I'd write up a proper post reflecting on my time. It's a  lot longer than these updates, so it takes longer to write, but keep your eyes peeled for it next week!

Week in Review: 20th of July

Updating a little earlier than normal this week, since School Summer Holidays mean that I'm off on childcare tomorrow!

Anyway, it's been a fairly steady week this week: I've had to slow down my return, and fight the temptation to do extra hours. After overdoing it last week, and then being hardly able to walk on Saturday, I realised that I really, really had to dial it back. So rather than upping the hours, I've stuck to half days this week, and I must say that I feel better this afternoon than I did last Thursday, so things are still going in the right direction. I've just got to pace myself, is all.

Of course, I've now turned a corner away from risk assessments, HR meetings and drawing up work plans to actually getting things done, which is a great feeling. Mostly, this week has been given over to reviewing two proposals that are due to go in this summer - not the Fellowship (though that will be coming back onto my desk next week, when these two go off), but an EPSRC grant on haptic support, and a last-minute NIHR bid on Heart Rate Monitoring. I'm not PI on either, but the time has come for me to add my tuppence worth as a co-investigator, and assess kit and research designs, costings, etc. All good stuff.

One thing I've really enjoyed is that we've been taking a more strategic approach to PACLab over the summer. We've developed a technology roadmap laying out the technologies and models we need to develop over the next few months and years to underpin our grant and paper writing (particularly in preparation for REF2020), drawn up a list of priorities, assigned them to people and we've started using the weekly PACLab slot to review progress. It's a great system, and it's good to have a regular point to touch base and see what progress is going on, rather than just beavering away in your office and relying on the odd email to catch up with people.

Also, I've just received a big load of data from Mark Mon-Williams to run through some of our grip models. It's really exciting stuff, and I had to resist the temptation to put in a little extra time to comb through it all now - especially since Monday seems a long time away. Likewise, more parts have arrived for FATKAT 2.0, and the temptation to start building is enormous - but I've learned my lesson from last week, and made sure to power down my PC on time, and take a break til Monday. So I'm signing off for now - stay tuned!

Week in Review: 13th July

It's been a busy week. In good ways, generally: attending a workshop for Leeds Institute of Data Analytics; a constructive meeting with HR and my line manager to review my return to work  (key takeaway: to slow down my return); PACLab; a meeting of the PACLab core team to agree summer priorities; a meeting with Anne-Marie Moore (Together Through Play researcher) and Angharad Beckett for the first time since Anne-Marie's viva; a meeting with our Director of Research to get feedback on my Fellowship; a meeting to discuss a forthcoming EPSRC bid on rehab robotics on which I'm co-I; a meeting with my summer intern student to discuss his progress with FATKAT (in a nutshell: good, and starting to break ground on actual data processing); and a meeting with Bryan Matthews from transport studies to discuss another potential research bid on accessible transport, and the focus groups to underpin it.

These are all good and productive things: this is the "end of the beginning" of my return to work, moving from planning and prioritising and just remembering what work is like to actually doing things. But there's no question I overdid it this week: that's 12 hours of meetings in a week where I'm meant to be doing 18 hours' work. Despite my best intentions, I ended up doing 20 hours, and I'm really feeling it!

I'll definitely have to watch out for that next week.

On the plus side things are coming together - but I can see I'll need to be more careful about pacing myself in future, rather than getting overexcited about being back. Still, at least there're things to get excited about, eh?

Week in Review: 6th July

Hmmm... I need to come up with some snazzier headings for these week in review posts. But not yet. Right now, I'm just pleased to have a working week to review.

So, I've survived my second week of phased return (now up to a whopping three hours a day!) and it has to be said: it's tougher than I had expected. On Monday afternoon, I was feeling quite pleased that I'd managed three hours work without feeling as shattered as I did after an hour and a half on Friday: I was obviously getting back into the swing of things! By Wednesday, dragging my exhausted limbs home, I had changed my tune. Still, here we are on Friday, and I've managed to do my allotted work - I'm happy to tick off as an achievement. I got in every day, I did my work - and that's more work than I've done in the previous 11 weeks. Of course, I won't be able to play that card again next week, so I'll make the most of it while I can!

And writing down what you've managed of a week is a good discipline - you often find out it's more than you thought. If nothing else, this episode has been a salutary reminder that just turning up and working is an achievement, and not to be taken for granted. Anyway - apart from that, I've managed to get another draft of my Fellowship application finished. That was hard work. Getting started was awful: I really had the sense of rusty gears grinding together as I tried to get my head around how to write again. By Wednesday afternoon, I was feeling quite down about it - but actually, things unjammed a bit on Thursday, and today I got it polished off and sent to others to take a look at, so that's big one off the To Do list. Also, I had a very productive meeting with Sarah Astill, Will Shaw and Romulo de Souza Martins (a student who will be studying with us over the summer as part of his Science without Borders Scholarship). It was good to be talking FATKAT again - and digging into metrics and feature recognition, and make some key decisions about what parameters we prioritise. Good stuff.

I'm back!

Well, that was unexpected! As the tone of my last post might indicate, when I said "maybe next week?" I hadn't anticipated that my next post would be over two months later.  I've just about got used to the idea that it isn't April any more, but it's taken some doing.

Anyway, I'm back, I'm better - and for the first time in two and a half months, I've just finished a week's work. I'm on a phased return, which has meant doing just over two hours a day this week, and gradually working up from there. Occupational Health had warned me it would be tiring, and I must say - they were absolutely right. Still, it's good to be back, and over the course of this week, coming in has gradually moved back to feeling normal. It's been a slow week - mostly dedicated to planning and time management. Risk-assessing my return, working through an email back log (and if I haven't got back to you yet - don't worry - I will!), and identifying what tasks I'm prioritising. So you'll have to take this as this week's "weekly update" - I got back, I started to get organised, and I turned up for work every day. Right now, that feels like an achievement in itself!

By the by, this week also heralded the second anniversary of this Blog! I was tempted to do a review of the last year, and a look forward to the next - but to be honest, it'll have to wait. I'm off to have a much-needed rest (and well-earned, if I say so myself). Next week, I'll hopefully have something more substantive to update you on!

Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell

I'm unwell. Not hungover unwell (as the title might imply) - unwell unwell. Looks like I picked the wrong month to try weekly updates. Maybe next week?

Week in Review 13th April

Boy - it has to be said that these week in review posts come around quickly! And of course, they take up time that might be spent blogging on loftier matters - though they are at least quick to write!

It's been a slightly shortened week, as my wife was ill, necessitating almost a whole day spread across the week to help out with childcare. A few meetings with undergraduates (who are now at the prototyping stage - always good fun), a mock-viva or a PhD student (whose viva is this week - I have another mock-viva today for a student whose viva is next week - they're coming thick and fast at the moment) but mostly, the week was given over to four things:

1) A day at JCM seating's roadshow when it came to Wakefield - it was good to get a chance to chat about upcoming research proposals, to see their seating in action and to meet the therapists who actually use it in practice. Good stuff. Contact with real problems and problem owners is always leaves me with a head buzzing with ideas.

2) FATKAT - with the data processing algorithms as ready as they can be, I've moved on to designing housing, redesigning the manpulandums (manipulanda? What is the plural there?), and putting together a cost proposal to build a second version, so that we can have a version ("FATKAT 1.0") to keep in the Faculty of Biological Sciences or running experiments while the original ("FATKAT dev", as I call it) returns to Engineering for continued development.

3) Grip modelling - Mark Mon-Williams and I now have a working mathematical model for our hypotheses about  finger co-ordination in reach-to-grasp actions. The next step is to actually link it to empirical data, so I've been testing LabVIEW's curve-fitting capabilities. I'm pleased to say they're up to the job, but Mark and I have agreed to forego any further work on that area until I've actually submitted my Fellowship bid to EPSRC.

4) Fellowship - now getting dangerously close to completion, but as those familiar with the Pareto Principle will know, the last 20% of the work can take 80% of the time! This week saw me drafting my Pathways to Impact, meeting with Mark Mon-Williams to finalise the links with Born in Bradford, removing the high-risk marker tracking elements (that felt like a step too far - with grip force modelling, and data management, and lab studies, and software, and user interfaces and usability... it felt like adding extra technical challenge (even if it's one we've already gone some way to solving) just detracted from the skills development aspects of the Fellowship. I also had a very productive meeting with David Keeling (an ex-colleague, who feels more like a colleague since he's still deeply involved with a lot of our work) of Key Solutions (a company he founded with Justin Gallagher - who you may recognise as a co-author on the K005/MyPAM/hCAAR projects) to discuss asset and data management once the proposed "big data" version of FATKAT is out in the BiB project as part of my pathways to impact. It may seem strange to outsource that sort of development, but Key Solutions have a lot of experience in that area, and we are already seeking NIHR funding to develop the asset management system for MyPAM. Also, the challenge isn't an academic one - I'm not proposing a brave new frontier in asset management systems, and I don't need to learn how to build them myself: I need one so that I can translate my research into practice in schools, or in projects such as BiB. An ongoing link with Key Solutions would be a good foundation or the future. Let's hope EPSRC agree, eh?

Week in Review - 6th April

It's been a quiet week this week: between Easter Monday, a University shutdown day on Tuesday, and a day off on Thursday to take my daughter to the Legoland Discovery Centre, I was only actually at work or two days. And I happen to be on diary exercise this week: every year, the University randomly samples our work on four different weeks, so it can report to HEFCE about how our time is being spent - basically verifying that we do the teaching we're paid for, and the research we're paid for, and don't use money from one to subsidise the other - a reasonable request, in my view! So this week, HEFCE are mostly going to know that even when I'm off for three days, I still do 20 hours' work. That's value for money!

Anyway, it's been a funny week - two isolated days (not to mention a lot of staff being on leave) meant that it wasn't a good time to start something new. There are a few things that are going to come back onto my To Do list tomorrow, but or this week, I wanted to basically work where I already had momentum. So, it meant discussions with National Instruments about control boards or FATKAT, finishing off the processing software, writing my Fellowship application and working on grip modelling with Mark Mon-Williams (which is getting quite exciting, but being as its all cutting edge stuff, I better keep the detail under my hat). And dealing with student queries, plus interviewing a prospective PhD candidate. Put like that, it sounds like I packed a lot into my two days! Ah well, a full week next week!

 

Week in Review - 30th March 2015

This week has largely been dedicated to FATKAT, which had its second outing today. On Monday Will Shaw and I went down to the lab, and put the revised model of FATKAT through its paces. That meant

1) Replacing the accelerometers - the prototype had two different models of accelerometer (thanks to the need for a last minute field replacement when the demoing to the International Spinal Research Trust), so I wanted to install two that we knew to be identical. It makes the processing software a lot easier to maintain, since the same pins refer to the same axes for both hands!

2) Replacing the protoboard with soldered circuitry - I'd used a protoboard for the amplifier circuitry (needed to get a decent resolution out of the force sensors), because I didn't know what gain we would need, and wanted to be able to easily change the resistors, without resorting to a variable resistor (that might then be inadvertently adjusted, etc). The protoboard was a real weak link, though - wires popped out, and needed replacing. Fine when I'm on hand to plug them back in, but not really sustainable if FATKAT is to be used by other people. Then I had the brainwave of using screw terminals to attach the resistors, so they could still be changed without the need to undo soldering, and so it was - a more permanent, soldered version of the circuitry was put together:

3) Trying the new calibration procedure and rewriting the calibration code in LabVIEW - this now seems to be working. My hope is that we'll only need to calibrate when hardware changes are made, but for now, the calibration process is a protection against wires being plugged in the wrong way round.

4) Having a few practice runs - we tried a few lifts each with 200g weights, and a few with 400g weights, then we each tried a slip force run (basically, picking the manipulandum up, holding it for a moment, then gradually releasing the force until it slips from the hand - this tells you the minimum force required to generate enough friction to hold it). The force trace is below:

It's coming out nice - you can see Will grips a lot harder than I do, but the slip force (last point before the force nose dives as the force sensor slips out of the hand) is very similar, which is what you'd expect.

And that's really been most of the week. The other big news was a PACLab strategy meeting, where we discussed global priorities, and how we wanted to take our various streams of work forwards and (just as important) how we communicate that work internally and externally. We haven't yet arrived at a finalised plan, but we're off to a good start. The three streams (Surgery, Developmental Research, and Rehabilitation/Mobility) are getting their websites planned out, and we'll be doing some technology roadmaps in the near future to look at what engineering Pete Culmer and I need to do to enable the next round of 4* REF outputs in time for REF2020.

I'm looking at grasp planning literature to underpin a paper that Mark Mon-Williams, Rachel Coats and I are writing.

I've also booked my flights for the next LUDI meeting - now confirmed for the first week of June in Limassol, Cyprus.

Last of all (outside work, admittedly - but relevant to the "Engineering Imagination"), I've been down at Leeds Hackspace, building my Raspberry Pi Camera system (complete with TFT screen. It's looking good. No preview shows as yet, so the aiming is a bit hit and miss, as you can see - but I'm well on my way to time-lapse photography, and some fresh computer vision projects...

 

 

Put like that, I actually got quite a lot done this week. Maybe this weekly review stuff will really work! Anyway, next week will be a lot less productive - Easter Bank Holiday, annual leave to look after my daughter (who's off school) will eat into most of the time. So I don't intend to start anything new - there are a bunch of things coming onto my desk (or back onto my desk) the week after, but for now, it's all about tidying up FATKAT, working on that paper, and brushing up the Pathways to Impact for my Fellowship application. Let's see how that goes...

 

 

Weekly Updates

It seems like every time I post, I apologise for taking so long to get round to it. I've already noted that Blogging goes invariably to the bottom of the To Do list - posts are slowly crafted over a long period, and finally uploaded after many long delays. I've also noted that Twitter is quite a good way of addressing this - activities and thoughts can be shared quickly, albeit in little depth. Part of the reason for this is that I try to address fairly lengthy topics - approaching each post almost as if it were an article in its own right. I'm the same with emails - I start to compose lengthy replies, and it takes a week or two to respond to someone. On email, I'm trying to address this by giving short, immediate responses (even if it just says "Thanks - it'll be a week or two before I can look at this"). At least that way, people know I've received their email, and I'm not just ignoring them.

A blog is a little bit different. There seems to be little point in me popping up every week or two just to say "Busy - will write more soon!", so I thought I'd try posting short, regular updates about what I've been busy doing. Part of the inspiration for this was the observation from a colleague that we don't do enough to celebrate our achievements: once we've got something done, we tend to move onto the next item on the To Do list, and the focus is forever on how far behind we are - what still needs to be done, not on what has actually been achieved. Twitter helps - a day of FATKAT testing results in a short stream of tweets, which is a nice way of shouting about it, but I thought, since I always try to take a bit of time to look back and forwards at the end of each week, I might as well share this via the Blog. That isn't to say that larger Blog posts will go the journey (I see this as an addition, rather than a replacement), but it's a good way of actually showing that the Blog is alive, rather than abandoned. We'll see how it goes!

What I Did in My Non-Holidays

Time management is a harsh mistress, and one of the things you have to learn in academia is that there are some times of the year when you're going to be rushed off your feet. Late January to early March is such a time - Open Days take up a full day every week, semester 1 exams and coursework have to be marked, Semester 2 teaching has to be set - the first round of semester 2 coursework has to be marked, our internal interim exhibition for the final year Product Design students has to be assessed, and it's not like the other responsibilities (PhD Students to supervise, seminars to attend, grant proposals to write, ethics applications to review, a Product Design programme to manage, visiting lecturers to look after). Now, none of these things are bad - even when they aren't fun, they're satisfying - but they are immoveable. And that means that everything else that you want to do has to fit in around them - so you have to be selective about what you go for. Opportunities crop up - seminars to attend, dedicated calls for proposals, research tools to develop. And some inevitably have to be kicked into touch for a period. You have to learn not to beat yourself up about that - and you have to make sure you sit down and take stock once the rush is over, so you know where you're going next. And blogging is a good place to sit down and work out those thoughts, and take stock.

Blogging is bottom of the pile during a busy period, of course, hence the lengthy radio silence. All the neat arduino and Raspberry Pi experiments I had planned have also been rested (my Raspberry Pi 2 has yet to be even turned on, over a month after ordering it on the day it was announced, and despite driving specially to the DPD depot so I could have it as early as possible!). I haven't gone near Python for a couple of months, except by proxy (PhD student Oscar Giles is doing some sterling work on implementing Bayesian Statistics on his work looking at interceptive tasks in children). But as you will know if you follow my Twitter feed, I have not been idle, nor have I been entirely swamped with teaching and admin. Indeed Twitter, as a micro-blogging service, is certainly proving its worth there - a photo or short notice can be pinged off in seconds. Blog posts take me at about an hour, and that's not allowing for the time spent mulling over what to say. And for the last few months, my free time has been given to the things that I have prioritised ahead of blogging.

I've been hard at work on FATKAT - the Finger and Thumb Kinetic Assessment Tool, which has now seen its first test run. Sarah Astill, Will Shaw and I got together to actually put it through its paces - and gather some initial data to try out the data processing algorithms, and initial results have been good. We'll be back in the lab later in the month to try the refined version, but I'm excited to have that up and running, and I'm hoping to provide a fuller overview of the system in a future post!

I've also joined the Leeds Hackspace, something I've been meaning to do for a while - lots of little projects on the go, and I'm hoping this will a) force me to benchmark time to actually work them, even if it's only once every couple of weeks; and b) give me a more social space to do it in - rather than sitting alone in my study!

I've got my little 4tronix robot base kit working, ready to start plugging it into my Raspberry Pi, and adding some sensors. The goal eventually is to turn it into a more "tangible" version of Button Bash - rather than just having an icon on a screen, having a buggy that could physically drive around would make for an interesting project. I was inspired by Kim Adams and Pedro Encarnacao with their Lego Mindstorm manipulators, and I'm also hoping that I can tap up some of the autonomous vehicle expertise here at Leeds to see if we can make it robust to poor control. That's largely for the future, though - right now, I just have a buggy that drives around under the code provided by Initio.

And where next? Well, there are a few things on the horizon. Communication Matters have just arrived at the Innovation Centre here at Leeds that's going to offer some exciting potential for collaboration. FATKAT will of course, be continuing in its development, and that I think will be the lion's share of where my spare capacity goes. I'm also trying to get an iDRO journal club set up - wish me luck, and I'll keep you posted!

Long time, no see...

Two months since my last post. What happened to January? Familial illness, mostly - three different maladies have worked their way through Clan Holt, necessitating days off work, school and nursery (and days off work to look after children who are off school and nursery), which combined with exam marking, launching new modules, running Applicant Days, as well as writing grants and papers, and supporting PhD students coming up to the finish line on their PhDs have all pushed blogging to the bottom of the pile. The arrival of the Raspberry Pi 2 didn't help either.

Still, things are calming down at last, and opportunities to write blog posts are starting to bubble up again, so hopefully you'll be hearing more from me in the coming weeks!

It's also worth saying that 2014 came to a sad end, with Bipin Bhakta (the driving force behind the rehabilitation bit of our rehabilitation robotics bit, and the man who first got me working on user-centred design with children, and so effectively shaped my entire career from 2006 onwards) and Gert Jan Gelderblom (leader of the working group I belong to in LUDI, and a prominent figure in that network), both passing away during December. I'll miss them both. God rest.