How does an 87-year-old walk on ice?

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How does an 87-year-old walk on ice?

December 1, 2011
by Paul Fraumeni (with files from Toronto Rehab)
From The Edge magazine

Photos by Rob Waymen

The aging boom is to be celebrated, says Professor Geoff Fernie. Especially healthy aging. But Fernie — an engineer by training, the Institute Director, Research, at the renowned Toronto Rehab hospital and professor in the Department of Surgery and the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering at U of T — also knows the need to face reality.

And that reality is this: aging is tough.

"It's not all people aged 55-plus windsurfing on a Florida beach. About one of every two of us will have a significant disability before we die. Twenty-seven per cent of Ontario families have provided care continuously for the past two years to someone in the family. The truth is that particularly daughters and wives give up their social lives and careers and live in difficult circumstances to cope with some pretty dreadful situations with aging parents. And about one in five of those caregivers need care themselves."

It's in tackling these problems that Fernie and his multidisciplinary team of innovators at Toronto Rehab come into play. "We see the problems older people face every day. Our commitment is to find solutions to these problems and get them out into the real world."

How, for example, can it be made easier for older people to get up off the toilet? What do you do to get up the stairs when you can't walk anymore? How can Fernie's team test ideas on controlling pernicious hospital-acquired infections that so often kill the elderly? How does an 87-year-old negotiate icy streets in the middle of a Canadian winter?

To address these questions, Toronto Rehab has created test facilities that are among the best in the world. And with the official launch of the sprawling iDAPT Centre for Rehabilitation Research, Toronto Rehab is taking a bold new step into the next generation of rehabilitation research innovation.

iDAPT (Intelligent Design for Adaptation, Participation and Technology) is a $36 million initiative that includes, at its core, simulation labs that replicate pretty much every physical environment of daily life.

HomeLab, for example, is a typical one bedroom bungalow, with a working bathroom and kitchen, stairs and furniture. It has an open ceiling so researchers can observe from above.

CareLab is a dedicated hospital room where researchers can experiment with new ways of caring for patients. Lifting devices can be tested, for example, or a sensor system that reminds health care professionals to disinfect their hands upon entering or leaving the room.

The centerpiece of iDAPT is CEAL (Challenging Environment Assessment Lab) the only one of its kind in the world. This huge subterranean research lab includes a group of laboratory pods.

In WinterLab, for example, actual icy walking surfaces can be created and the temperature can be decreased to -20C. "Everything gets worse in winter," says Fernie. "More people get injured and sick, the death rate goes up, depression happens. There's a lot to learn."

Jennifer Hsu, a U of T PhD candidate in biomedical and mechanical engineering, is conducting research in this lab to improve winter slip-resistance in footwear, in collaboration with the boot and shoe industry.

Fernie sees a number of opportunities and benefits from iDAPT and CEAL.

"In addition to enabling us to solve problems, the big goal is to raise the level of interest in this critical area of research. When people used to talk about rehabilitation research in the past, there was a big yawn. But that's changed — no one has ever done anything on the scale that we are doing here. And we have a team from across the university in rehabilitation sciences, medicine, surgery, nursing, computer science, engineering, and many others that outside experts say is the most diverse group of researchers and students they've ever seen."

Fernie also believes iDAPT can play a role in rehabilitation science and research that is similar to the role the CERN particle accelerator (home of the Large Hadron Collider project) in Europe is playing for physics. "Not every rehab research group can have a set-up of this size. So we want researchers and companies from around the world to come here and work with us. We need larger teams to solve these larger problems."

"We like big problems," he says. "And we have the capacity and talent to work on them. We don't let go of a problem until we've found the solution."

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To learn more about the iDAPT labs, visit the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail.

University of Toronto Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering

How does an 87-year-old walk on ice?