Month: June 2014

2 Golds and a Silver for GB Para-Rowers

Team GB have had a successful weekend at the Rowing World Cup in France, winning Gold in the 100m men’s single skull and the mixed cox four along with Silver in the women’s single skull.

Pam Relph and James Fox, two of the members of the cox four competing last Saturday have been advising a team of Bioengineering 2nd year students at Imperial College as part of the Rio Tinto Sports Innovation Challenge. The team have been tasked with developing training aids to assist Pam and James with their rowing. Tomorrow will see a selection of the students present the prototypes and their project report to Pam and James and other members of GB Para Rowing.

More detail on the projects will appear in a later Blog post.

 

Team Bruise and The Bike Experience

A slightly damp and overcast Monday on a stretch of windswept tarmac may not sound like the ideal way to start your week, but for one group of bikers it was a dream come true that many may have thought impossible. The Bike Experience is a charity that teaches and advises motorcyclists who have been disabled how they can ride again. Founded by Talan Skeels-Piggins in 2011 the charity is unique in its goals of assisting disabled bikers back onto two wheels.

Students from the Innovation Design Engineering course (a double masters course run in partnership between Imperial College and the RCA) were in attendance yesterday to demonstrate the Rio Tinto Sports Innovation Challenge project, the Bruise suit. This innovative system uses a film developed for the assessment of industrial machinery to assist paraplegic sports men and women to be able to determine the potential damage to their body following a knock or crash. The system was developed following discussions with Talan about his life as an alpine sit-skier as part of Team GB in the 2010 Winter Paralympics. The team went up to Silverstone yesterday to present Talan with a prototype suit and to take part in interviews for the BBC.

Team Bruise Filming with Talan Skeels-Piggins at Silverstone

World Cup kicked off with the aid of an Exoskeleton

Yesterday the World Cup kicked off with flamboyant carnival spirit. But you may have missed at the centre of it all the first kick of the official World Cup ball being made by Juliano Pinto, a 29 year old with complete paralysis of the lower trunk. This was achieved by means of a mind-controlled Exoskeleton developed by Brazilian neuroscientist Dr Miguel Nicolelis at Duke University.

Dr Miguel Nicolelis is a leading expert in the field of brain-machine interface development working as part of the “Walk Again Project” consortium.

You can see Dr Etienne Burdet of Imperial College discussing exoskeleton development as part of a BBC article on exoskeletons and their use in rehabilitation. And we hope to bring you more developments in the use of robotics as part of the lead up to the 2016 Cybathlon to be held in Zurich.