2009 Newsletters
Mar 13th, 2009
No Barriers Announces 2009 Festival at Shake-A-Leg Miami Seabase
___________________________________________________________________________
No Barriers Announces 2009 Festival at Shake-A-Leg Miami Sea Base
___________________________________________________________________________
Erik and the No Barriers USA Board of Directors is excited to announce the No Barriers 2009 Festival at Shake-A-Leg Miami Sea Base on June 4-7, 2009. The No Barriers Festival, now in its fourth year, is a unique, international, multi-day event that showcases cutting-edge techniques and technologies that enable people with challenges to live active and adventurous lives.
The last three bi-annual festivals have been held in mountain settings, twice in Cortina, Italy and once at Squaw Valley, California. This year the board of directors decided to make a shift.
Director Mark Wellman explains, "We selected a marine location to show the diversity of our mission and to illustrate how breaking through barriers is more than about climbing mountains and succeeding in the rugged outdoors. There is a wave of innovation and outdoor education on the water and there are very few organizations like Shake-A-Leg Miami who are making things happen. Our partnership will help us make our 2009 Festival more incredible than any of our previous three.
For more information and to register, visit:
www.nobarriersusa.org
The following article, written by board member Mike Saviki, was featured in Paraplegia Newsand beautifully captures the spirit of No Barriers.
___________________________________________________________________________
|
A Wounded Warrior learns to sail at the Shake-A-Leg Miami Sea Base.
|
|
_______________________________________________________________
Innovating Beyond Barriers
By Mike Saviki
___________________________________________________________________________
From a morphing handcycle and tactile visual substitution device to an actively powered ankle-foot prosthetic, users and scientists are sharing ideas that shift the paradigm of possibility and bring the seemingly impossible to reality.
When it comes to understanding the handcycle, it is safe to say that Rory McCarthy of Bath, Maine, knows a thing or two about what it takes to makes the wheels spin. After sweating through almost three decades on the road and logging upwards of 75,000 arm-powered miles that included two trips across the United States, a trip from north to south, a journey the length of Vietnam and a nine-month odyssey around the world, McCarthy had handcycled more places than most other cyclists and handcyclists dream of visiting. If you ask Rory McCarthy to tell you about the biggest challenges he encountered along the way, he will tell you it had nothing to do with the conditions, the miles or even the Gobi Desert; he says that those many times when he was without his wheelchair, fitting the handcycle into the attractions, sites and homes he encountered along the way posed the biggest challenge.
Blind climber, Erik Weihenmayer, of Golden, Colorado, tells a similar story. After losing his eyesight at age thirteen, friends and family believed Weihenmayer's chances of living a full and rewarding life had become all but impossible. Yet Weihenmayer trudged ahead and pioneered countless personal systems that made it possible for him to climb to new heights and achieve goals that most sighted people consider impossible. He is the only blind climber to stand on the summit of the world's seven tallest summits, including Mount Everest, and says that despite his accomplishments, there were still little things he wanted to do in his life that no amount of hard work or determination on his own might provide. Despite his blindness, Weihenmayer says he yearned for a way to see and share the small images that his children saw in books and games as they grew.
And when Hugh Herr, Ph.D. lost both his legs to frostbite near the sub-zero summit of Mount Washington in whiteout conditions in 1982, he did not let his disability keep him from returning to the outdoors he so loved to explore. Herr thought of ways to use his disability to his advantage and began building prosthetic limbs that allowed him to make his legs just a bit longer, and climb at a more advanced level, than he could before his accident. By thinking outside the realm of existing possibility, Hugh Herr opened doors for others and made it possible to actively participate in those outdoor activities and professions that had previously been unattainable to amputees. However, Herr admits that even with the most advanced prosthetic devices in place, there were dissynergies between the performance of existing prostheses and replicating the optimal performance of the human body through advanced technology.
What makes Rory McCarthy, Erik Weihenmayer and Hugh Herr unique is the fact that they have all chosen to get involved with the researchers and developers who create the products that make life accessible to those similarly disabled rather than settle for using existing products and assistive devices that fall short of their lofty expectations. By becoming scientists as well as end users, each has helped advance the rate at which assistive devices, gear and equipment change the world for the disabled. And they are using unique, collaborative forums and symposiums to share their results with the world.
Raising Mobility to Another Plane
When McCarthy and his business partner, Bill Warner, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, began thinking about redesigning the handcycle to make it also function like a lightweight, everyday wheelchair, the duo came upon an idea of creating a product that actually transformed from one to the other.
"As my mobility needs changed," offers Rory McCarthy, "I saw a need for a product that would allow me to move from the outdoors, where I love to travel and explore, right onto the elevator at work or into my home at the end of the day. I thought about the times I could not enter a building or didn't have crutches or a wheelchair and had my freedom compromised."
McCarthy and Warner collaborated with other designers through a non-profit organization called Move With Freedom, Inc., to create the world's first Morphing Handcycle in 2007. The idea for the Morph, according to McCarthy, was to combine the speed of a racing handcycle with the maneuverability of a regular wheelchair. It became a complicated process when we had to consider factors like seat angle, center of gravity, the height of the Morph in the upright and lowered positions and overall weight, too. Our first model was a great start but we knew we had more work to do."
Move With Freedom's latest Morph will be unveiled at No Barriers Festival 2009 at Shake-A-Leg Miami Sea Base. "The newest Morph is lighter and rides lower and faster in the morphdown position than our first model," explains McCarthy. "We have also incorporated a gas strut into the design that allows the user to stop in multiple positions instead of either morphup or morphdown."
In addition to the Morphing Handcycle, Rory McCarthy and Bill Warner are leading researchers in the development of a multi-positional, manual wheelchair that gives the user the freedom of safely and quickly positioning the seat height at different levels based on desired activities or disability limitations.
New Pathways to Sight
In 2006, Neuroscientist Aimee Arnoldussen, Ph.D., approached Erik Weihenmayer and asked him to test a tactile vision substitution device called BrainPort® in a real world setting. BrainPort®, a non-surgical, vision assistive tool for orientation, mobility, object identification and spot reading for the visually impaired, is the result of research by Wicab, Inc., a Wisconsin-based biomedical engineering company. BrainPort® enables perception of visual information using the tongue and camera system as a paired substitute for the eye.
Weihenmayer saw the opportunity as a way to reintroduce important senses that had been taken away when he lost his sight. "Your brain is what really sees, not your eyes," offers Erik Weihenmayer. "If your eyes don't work, you can create another portal that will allow your brain to interpret the world around you."
Dr. Arnoldussen explains that information to the brain is the same whether you collect it with the eyes or with a camera and a tongue display. The BrainPort® converts light into electrical impulses that stimulate the tongue instead of the retina. Users describe it as pictures drawn on their tongue with champagne bubbles. "With training," Arnoldussen adds, "users like Erik can recognize numbers, perceive shapes and sense the location and movement of certain objects in their environment."
"We use one sense to substitute for another when one is missing and train the brain to recognize images using those senses that are present instead of those that might be impaired," Weihenmayer says. "I'm just at the beginning of the stage, and I think you can take this innovation so much farther than anyone could imagine."
How much farther? Erik Weihenmayer concludes, "After working with the BrainPort® for only a short time and learning how to sense images through my tongue, I was able to play tic-tac-toe and rock-paper-scissors with my daughter and catch her when I thought she might be cheating. Imagine what might be next."
Dr. Arnoldussen and her team plan to unveil the next generation BrainPort® at No Barriers Festival 2009 at Shake-A-Leg Miami Sea Base. Arnoldussen says the newest device features a small, sunglasses-mounted camera and incorporates more conspicuous wiring and processing devices with a wider degree of uses.
A New Foot Forward
Twenty-five years after losing his legs to frostbite, Hugh Herr, NEC Career Development Professor, and his Biomechatronics research group at the MIT Media Lab developed the first powered ankle-foot prosthesis -- the PowerFoot One. Dr. Herr says the device is capable of propelling the wearer forward and varying its stiffness over irregular terrain and, for the first time, providing amputees with a truly human-like gait. Herr created the device through the Center for Restorative and Regenerative Medicine, a collaborative research initiative that includes the Providence VA Medical Center, Brown University, and MIT and markets it through iWalk, Inc, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based firm dedicated to becoming the leader in wearable devices for human augmentation.
"PowerFoot One mimics the elegance of nature," explains Hugh Herr. "A muscle-like robotic assist releases three times the power of conventional prostheses to propel the body upward and forward in walking."
"It's wild," he exclaims. "You feel like you are on one of those moving walkways in an airport."
Dr. Herr adds that he and his team are also working on developing artificial limb technology that would be controlled directly by the brain rather than by a computer. He hopes to incorporate it in advanced models of the PowerFoot One. Herr believes that results may be found in taking advantage of the 'phantom limb' phenomenon, in which an amputee's brain tries to move an appendage that is no longer there.
The Power of Collaboration
Erik Weihenmayer sees events like No Barriers Festival 2009 at Shake-A-Leg Miami Sea Base as necessary forums where end users and researchers can come together to create new products and innovations. He says, "Lots of people will introduce technology in a bubble but we feel at No Barriers that there is no way to separate technologies from challenges. You have to give people the ideas they are looking for and, at the same time, give them a challenging environment where they can test them out. So the whole idea behind No Barriers is to give people an active challenge so they know these technologies and ideas will work and that they can apply them."
Hugh Herr adds, "The idea of the Festivals and our scientific forums is that you bring together all parties, including end users, for discussion and exploration. If you have everyone in the same room talking, you can apply a better vector toward innovation and direct research and development in important areas."
When this happens, Herr concludes, the possibilities become endless.
___________________________________________________________________________
|
A young man learns to use a "Segway" scooter at the No Barriers Festival in Squaw Valley, California.
|
|
Back to top
Back to list page
Email this Page
