Helping Others to EAT
- Details
- Created on 13 July 2017
- Written by Steve Burrows
One of the great advantages in living on a small island is the sense of community. So many of us are actively involved in local community initiatives, freely giving our time and expertise to benefit the island and those living here. I have written previously about Code Club and STEAM Lab which are creating opportunities for people to learn how to program computers and to create technology using small computers such as Arduino and Raspberry Pi. These skills can be used for may purposes - almost all of the electronically controlled machines we use everyday including washing machines, cookers, motor cars etc. are programmed and controlled using fundamentally similar methods and technologies.
As users of these common everyday machines we don’t generally need to know much about how the innards work, because somewhere there will be a supplier technician or service engineer who we can turn to when a machine goes wrong - but what if the machine is not “common” or “everyday”? Who do we turn to if our troublesome machine is the only one on the Island? Anyone who has read the tales in our island’s news about the Government’s defective diesel locomotive or the unfinished airport Radar system will realise that owning a “one off” machine can be challenging.
Some folks don’t have a choice. Due to their impairments there are a few people on the island who rely on electronic control mechanisms that have been built or configured uniquely for them or for a very small number of people with their special needs. People who cannot use their hands to select or press a button on a remote control, cannot turn on the lights, switch on the TV & select a channel, adjust the tilt of a motorised bed, operate a joystick to direct the movement of their motorised wheelchair etc.
Some people are so impaired that they cannot talk or even push a button to summon a nurse or carer. If you find such impairment difficult to imagine then think of the physicist Stephen Hawking - one of the most brilliant scientists on the planet who is so paralysed by motor neurone disease that he has lost the ability to speak or control his hands - he controls his speech synthesizer with a facial cheek muscle and can (erratically) control his wheelchair with his chin (although he can’t move his neck).
An unfortunate consequence of island demographics is the difficulty of supporting the small number of people living here who depend on very specialised high technology “Electro-Assistive Technology” (EAT) solutions to assist them. The cost of bringing experts to the island to construct, configure, and maintain such equipment is disproportionately expensive for a relatively few number of individuals. In the event of an equipment failure the cost of bringing in an expert from across is sometimes prohibitive - individuals or charities supporting them struggle to afford the cost of an engineer and his travel expenses coming to the island to repair a single fault.
The net effect of our dependency on off-island EAT suppliers is that some of the people on the island who would genuinely benefit from access to Electro-Assistive Technology are disadvantaged because suitable commercial solutions from off-island are too expensive to buy, install and maintain. Instead these people have to accept that they are less independent and must rely more on their carers than similarly impaired people in larger 1st-world nations.
The EAT Pi project was conceived by a well respected local IT expert, Steve Wilson, as a socially driven and supported project to devise a means of providing local individuals and their carers with solutions that they really need. Steve has a degree in Physics and Electronics, and has been one of the leaders of the electronics and robotics activities in Code Club. Through his encounters with similarly skilled volunteers and the more advanced youngsters who regularly attend he has found that many of the necessary skills to build and maintain specialist Electro-Assistive Solutions are available on the island and could be harnessed to help meet the island’s needs.
Steve himself has designed and developed a prototype system which could be used by people with very serious impairments to control electronic or electro-mechanical equipment, and the underlying technologies are cheap and typical of those used by computing and electronics hobbyists and students. The concept is is built around the use of powerful yet affordable microcontrollers such as the Raspberry Pi or Arduino . By careful selection of appropriate software it has been possible to build a standalone Wi-Fi backbone to which adapters can be integrated. These adapters execute simple instructions such as turning lights on and off or changing the TV channel.
The adapters can be controlled by the user with special switches selected according to their personal capabilities, for example by using a Puff-Suck switch which is activated by sucking or puffing breath down a tube, or an Eye-Blink switch which detects when the user closes an eye, or one of several types of Finger Pressure switch depending on the capabilities of the individual. Any of these can be used to enable the user to activate an adaptor and control an electrical device simply by activating the switch at the time when the desired action icon is highlighted on a display positioned in the sight-line of the user.
Sadly, due to the lack of facilities to make the boxes needed to contain the adapters the project has stalled. A considerable amount of effort has been put into solving all the technical issues and there is a demonstrable CodeBase which has been deployed to devices mentioned above. With the right support and enthusiasm from socially minded people Steve believes the project could be re-started and functioning units delivered for the benefit of those people on the island who are so seriously impaired as to need sophisticated Electro-Assistive Technology solutions. As an island community initiative much of the input needed could be delivered as a by-product of local training programs for IT students and enthusiasts, both in Code Club & STEAM Lab, and in the computing / technology education curriculums within local schools, University College of Mann, and IT and Engineering company’s Apprenticeship schemes.
The technologies chosen have been carefully selected to utilise mainstream programming languages and constructs, and inexpensive hardware commonly used for computing tuition, so the skills and expertise learned through participating in the EAT Pi project are both re-usable and illustrate many of the important approaches to building domestic control systems and Internet of Things technologies.
One final plug …. The nature of the design approach for the EAT Pi project necessarily overcomes many of the limitations of the commercial solutions currently obtained from off-island, most of which are based on older technologies requiring obscure or bespoke proprietary control circuits, because in being based on modern wi-fi connected controllers the systems based on EAT Pi could be remotely diagnosed and if necessary re-programmed via the Internet, significantly reducing the need for engineers to visit in person to make adjustments or repairs. This opens up the possibility for Electro-Assistive Technology solutions based on the EAT Pi project to be exported around the world and still be effectively and economically supportable from the Isle of Man.
The EAT Pi project is intended primarily to support those very few people on the island who, like Professor Hawking, are unable to operate the everyday electronic control technologies which the rest of us take for granted. Anecdotally there maybe around twenty such individuals. If you think you may be able to help, with student / apprentices to work on the project as part of their practical experience, or time to coordinate and manage the activities of project contributors, or with money, or expertise or equipment, or space and workshop facilities please get in touch with me, Steve Burrows, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., and I will forward your interest to the EAT Pi team.
