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?
Sunday 26 April 2015
Monday 20 April 2015
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?
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?
Sunday 12 April 2015
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!
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!
Friday 3 April 2015
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...
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!
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!
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