Disability and Technology - Tim Poindexter

Haven't got your fill of the Paralympics? Tune in to NBC Dec. 6th

2008-12-04T21:03:00Z

Are you a hardcore Paralympics fan? Maybe you're just curious to see expanded coverage of sporting events with people with disabilities, regardless be sure to check out NBC on Saturday:

The stories of U.S. Paralympians at the 2008 Paralympic Games will be featured once again on NBC this Saturday, December 6 at 4:30 p.m. Eastern Time. The documentary, which originally aired November 9, takes viewers on a compelling journey into the lives of U.S. Paralympians as they vie for triumph in Beijing, China. The 90-minute broadcast is narrated by NBC Sports' Bob Costas.

Want to relive more Paralympics coverage? Check out Disaboom's articles:

Paralympics Athlete - April Holmes: Out of the Blocks

Creating Paralympians

Female Paralympians Set Sights on Beijing

14 yr old girl survived 118 days without a heart, she was kept alive by a special machine

2008-11-20T21:54:00Z

D'Zhana Simmons, a 14 year old girl from South Carolina, lived for nearly 4 months without a heart. She suffered from a condition called dilated cardiomyopathy (where the heart becomes weakened and enlarged and fails to pump blood efficiently) and was waiting for a transplant.

Simmon's blood was kept ciculating by two blood pumps, she said that the experience was "scary" because of the everpresent worry that the machine would malfunction.

"You never knew when it would malfunction," she said at the University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Medical Center. "It was like I was a fake person, like I didn't really exist. I was just here.

"But I know that I really was here, and I did live without a heart."

Simmons was recently released from the hospital after successfully undergoing her second heart transplant.

(source)

Better, faster, stronger and more connected

2008-10-30T00:55:00Z

Disaboom.com has come a long way since last year, we’ve gone through many design changes on the front end, have added lots of new content and features and have seen tons of new visitors and site members. It’s been a very exciting time for us and hopefully for you too. Disaboom isn’t much without its vibrant community, and we give a big shout out to you for being a part of this place and for sharing it with your friends and family.

It’s All About Speed

I want to share some exciting new developments with you: one of the things that our users have been very vocal about is Disaboom’s site speed. What we’ve heard from some of you is this: “We love the site, but it’s too slow! It takes forever to load!” We’ve had site speed as one of our top development priorities for a little while now and have made many changes on the site both visible and invisible to speed things up for you. First of all it’s important to note that 7% of our regular visitors use dial-up modems, so we needed to make sure that we were taking these users into account as much as possible.

We started by looking at load size of pages across the site and doing what we could to optimize that (reduce number of queries, number of image calls, etc). Many of our changes here, such as the New Community Page and the New Portal Pages, were designed in based off of things we learned while examining site page load times. The result for those pages is positive in that the pages are faster and they are cleaner and easier to use. In addition to those changes we also brought on Strangeloop to help optimize the delivery of our pages. You can read a press release about that here.

Finally, here’s some of the actual advancement we’ve made: 1) all of our pages have been optimized through Strangeloop so that their payload is 50% smaller, 2) most of our pages now load a couple of seconds faster than they did before, 3) the biggest and most complex pages on the site (like the community page and the home page) have seen even bigger speed gains and now load up to 50% faster. Strangeloop went into effect last week while Disaboom was presenting at Health 2.0. We’re not finished speeding things up, we are continuing to optimize Strangeloop and are also looking at ways that we can redesign other “heavy” pages on the site so that they’re even snappier.

Condition-Based Connections

One of our goals is to connect groups of people with shared affinities. For example—we’ve had women on the site for a long time with spinal cord injuries who had children while disabled as well as women with spinal cord injury who are currently pregnant or who are looking to get pregnant in the future. We want these people to connect. That’s why we started building Portals. Portals are designed to capture synergies and shared interests in the community.

Portals work by indexing every word in the entire site and then arranging that Intel, based off our semantic input, into dynamically generated summary pages. Portals are defined by words and phrases, and when such a phrase is present in a Discussion Forum it links, in a visually differential way, to the Portal Landing Page. Here’s a Fibromyalgia Portal. The page collects related blogs, discussions, article, groups and user profiles and effectively connects people interested in a particular topic to similar content throughout the community.

As you can see we’ve been very busy here at Disaboom. The site’s much faster, we have a fresh community and home page and we’ve made a major effort at connecting people to stuff they’re interested in with the new Portal Pages. Anything else?

Chat

This is what some of you have been waiting for! We’ve been looking at solutions to bring chat back to the site. We want to be able to provide a civil environment for people to connect and we think we finally have a way to do that. Stay tuned for Chat to return to the site by (cross your fingers) the end of November. Thanks for making Disaboom.com what it is! Have fun cruising around the site and don’t forget to tell your friends about this remarkable community.

Brain-Computer Interface May End Paralysis

2008-10-15T21:42:00Z

Here's an interesting article about some new developments in medical technology that could make an impact on people with spinal cord injury or other types of paralysis; this from io9 in regard to a recent report by Nature:

Using a computerized connector between the brain and muscles in the body, scientists have been able to restore movement to paralyzed limbs. A group of neuroscientists report in Nature today that they used a brain-computer interface to join the motor cortex of an ape to the muscles in its wrist. After scientists paralyzed the ape's arm temporarily, it was still able to make its wrist move my sending electrical impulses directly from its brain to the muscles, bypassing the damaged nerves in between. The study has profound implications for people whose nerves have been severed or damaged, leaving them paralyzed.

...

Human implementations for the technology are at least a decade away, but this discovery could be a game-changer for dealing with paralysis. One possibility would be to connect the motor cortex with an area of the spine below an injury. Signals would be re-routed around the damaged spinal cord, and could allow the brain to regain control of the paralyzed body parts affected by the injury.

What do you think?

9 Concrete Actions for National Disability Employment Awareness Month

2008-10-14T21:27:00Z

October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month. We've got a great article over in the Living section about that, here are some of the highlights:

Increased awareness is good, increased employment is better. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 67 percent of people with disabilities are currently unemployed – roughly 10 times the national unemployment rate, and a number that has improved little since the introduction of National Disability Employment Month in 1988. So although it’s great to support the NDEA, taking concrete action to improve that percentage is the only thing that’s likely to move the bar. Here are some ideas to consider right now:

Assess your situation...

Make full use of your community resources...

Identify your strengths...

Be able to identify needed accommodations...

Find out about disability-friendly companies...

Consider alternative employment options...

Learn from others...

Know that it’s up to you...

Vote...

Read full details on each one of the tips and get more background on Disability Employment at the article.

Trip to pub results in new leg for man

2008-09-29T23:09:00Z

Here's a great story, though I'm not sure what the moral is:

Not many people walk into a bar and walk out with a new leg.

But that’s what happened to David Huckvale, 42, who needed a £40,000 bionic leg to walk again.

The father-of-two popped down to his local pub on the same day surgeon Alistair Gibson, who specialises in fitting the computer-controlled limb, was there for a pint.

When the two happened to meet Mr Gibson mentioned he had a spare leg and could fit Mr Huckvale for free.

Mr Huckvale had his leg amputated when he was 29 after a benign tumour was removed.

Before the chance encounter, he had been limping around in a false leg, which didn’t fit properly and walked with the help of crutches and was sometimes in a wheelchair.

Mr Huckvale had read about the bionic leg available in the US and was saving for one – but had only managed to put away a fraction of the required £40,000.

New Man-Made Eye Lasts Longer

2008-09-25T20:11:00Z

These high tech looking artifical eyes aren't something out of the new science fiction show "Fringe," they're actually real! Check out the report from Technology Review:

For many blind or partially sighted people, implants that stimulate healthy nerve cells connected to their retinas could help restore some normal vision. Researchers have been working on such implants since the 1980s but with only limited success. A major hurdle is making an implant that can stay in the eye for years without declining in performance or causing inflammation.

Now researchers with the Boston Retinal Implant Project, which was spun out of MIT, Harvard Medical School, and the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary in 1988, have developed hardware they say overcomes such issues. The implants have been tested in animals, and the group plans to start human trials by 2010.

In retinal diseases such as acute macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa, the light-sensing cells of the retina may no longer work, even though the neurons that carry signals from these cells to the brain are still healthy. The Boston project uses an array of electrodes to stimulate these cells and reproduce a simplified visual image in the subject's brain. A camera mounted on a pair of eyeglasses captures an image, which is rapidly processed by a microcontroller to produce a simplified picture. This is then wirelessly beamed to the implant, which activates 15 electrodes inside the eye. The implant also receives power wirelessly from the microcontroller.

In its current form, the implant can reproduce only a 15-pixel image, but the group is working on a version with around 100 pixels and hopes to get up to 1,000 eventually.

The latest implant has been successfully tested in pigs, whose eyes are comparable in size to our own. It hasn't yet been tested in people, but the research group is confident it will restore enough vision to let people walk around unaided.

Guardian Asks: How Should TV Treat Disability?

2008-09-24T00:15:00Z

This from the Guardian's "Question of the Week" column:

We ask: how can TV improve its coverage and portrayal of disability?

Roger Mosey, director of sport, BBC (soon to take Olympic post)
This sounds dangerously like a corporate mantra but I'm an advocate here of "fewer, bigger, better". When I came to BBC Sport there was a bit too much token squeezing of disability sports into odd slots on Grandstand - and I don't think that actually gave the proper profile. The Paralympics, to which we gave record amounts of airtime this year, worked because they were fantastically well staged; and you had large, passionate crowds watching elite-performance sport.

If you think about some UK-based disability events, like the Paralympic World Cup, there's still great sport on show, but it was disappointing to see such sparse attendances in Manchester this year.

So my lesson for the future would be to concentrate on a smaller number of disability events - but make them as big and as powerful as you can.

Richard McKerrow, creative director, Love Productions
Disabled people are virtually invisible on mainstream British TV, in news or current affairs and especially in drama. Yes, you get the odd documentary, some news reports on disabled issues and characters in dramas who happen to suddenly develop a disability. But where, crucially, are the disabled reporters and presenters reporting on everyday events? Where are the characters, who just happen to be disabled, in our soaps and mainstream dramas? We need to take some lessons from US drama where there is a far better reflection of society. Until this happens we will remain afraid of disability and we will need to carry on trying to make provocative disabled series that challenge mainstream thinking, like our programme Britain's Missing Top Model.

Faster, Spryer Disaboom On the Way

2008-09-09T21:50:00Z

As Disaboom.com continues to expand in size, the mice that power all the servers have a hard time running fast enough to make the whole thing move as quickly as we'd like it to. They're trying hard, but sometimes it's just not good enough. Some of you have commented on how slow the site is. We've been listening and it's one of our big concerns.

We've been working on this issue for a while because it is important to us to provide a quality site experience to you all, and a big part of that is making sure that the site loads quickly. I wanted to give you a heads up that sometime in October we'll be implementing some really cool high-tech optimization components that, according to the preliminary tests we've already run, should be able to improve the speed of the site dramatically. The forums potentially could load 80% faster. In addition to that, we'll be making smaller, incremental improvements that will also improve the load time of the site. The first one of those improvements was released today (it's already made a difference in load time for me).

Thanks for your patience and let me know if you have any questions. In the meantime, stay tuned for a faster, spryer Disaboom.com.

Denver "Live Forward" Meetup

2008-08-14T18:32:00Z

Hey all you Denver area Disaboomers listen up!

Disaboom is hosting its first ever Community Meetup next Wednesday evening from 7-9pm at the VSA arts of Colorado/Access Gallery (located in the arts district in Denver off of Santa Fe). Dr. Glen House, founder of Disaboom, will be speaking on what it means to Live Forward. Refreshments will be provided.

This should be an awesome time to get to know one another in person and to connect with new people. Plus there's free food and you'll get to meet Glen!

Limits spots are available, so please RSVP if you plan on attending this event. To sign up go to:

http://disaboommeetup.eventbrite.com

The password to access the sign up page is: liveforward

Details again:

Location: in Denver (Arts District off of Santa Fe)

Date: Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Time: 7-9pm

RSVP - Required!

We look forward to seeing you next week!

Disaboom Chat Suspended

2008-08-12T20:55:00Z

What do you get when you put a large assortment of people with different backgrounds, opinions and ideas in a place of public discourse where almost anything can be said without fear of meaningful non-verbal reprisal? What if the identity of these people is masked by distance and arbitrary screen names?

You get a chat room full of people who, despite good intentions, often degenerate into reactionary villains bent on winning arguments and verbally assaulting those who disagree with them or frustrate them. You get selfishness and anger and large amounts of pettiness. I guess that's human nature, but in most cases there are built in filters that check these regretful tendencies, like being face to face with another human being or having the realization that everyone knows your real name and that you have a reputation to protect. However, those two filters will never exist in chat.

But there is a third filter, which is far more important: Sometimes you encounter people who have self-control, a strong sense of responsibility and a great deal of understanding and respect for the people they encounter, regardless of the medium in which these encounters take place. That's the sort of filter that needs to be in place in an online chat room, and seemingly that filter is only tenuously present in the Disaboom chat rooms. I sure wish that sort of person were in the majority.

For now, then, the Disaboom Chat Rooms will be closed.

So, has Disaboom bowed to those who can't control their emotions and their words? Has it given in to people who seem to have no concept of disagreeing with an argument rather than insulting the people with whom they disagree? I don't think so. Think of this as a revocation of privileges. When chat comes back (and that is currently the plan, though it is subject to change) it will only be for those who have won the privilege to participate by giving evidence of the existence of the third filter in their character. Gradually chat will be opened up to more users and hopefully a place of healthy civil discourse can be sustained.

Until then you can carry on in the forums and the blogs, where proof of excess and total disregard for others can be more easily recognized and appropriately penalized.

Have $387,568 to spare? Hook yourself up with this Jet-Powered Wheelchair

2008-08-06T19:18:00Z

For the kid who has everything...

--------------

11-yr-old Internet superstore Allegro Medical recently unveiled a $387,568 jet powered wheelchair illustrating that the sky is the limit when it comes to making your wheelchair “beautiful”. Probably not exactly what National Wheelchair Beautification Month founder Horace Knowles had in mind when he invented the July holiday, but Allegro considers its ‘Jet Chair’ beautiful nonetheless.

The image of the supercharged wheelchair, complete with jet engine, fat run-flat high pressure tires, a rear airfoil, windsock and curb feelers (for easy parking) is part of an advertising campaign to encourage savvy wheelchair users to “Pimp Their Ride”. The wheelchair is advertised for $387,568 -- marked down from $755,000 -- and is reported to go 0-300 mph in 4.2 seconds. A safety helmet and fire-retardant underwear are recommended.

(from the product page)

The Jet Chair combines today’s advances in jet propulsion with modern wheelchair design to make a practical, general-purpose sub-sonic everyday chair. The wheelchair finally meets the jet age in this aggressively styled, “weekend warrior” -type chair. Perfectly at home in the Bonneville Salt Flats doing 400mph or cruising to the market, the Jet Chair offers something for everyone.

Designed at the famed Lockhood Martin “Skunk Works”, the jet powered wheelchair was initially developed as a high-speed ground-based escape pod for the legendary SR71 Blackbeard. With the close of the cold war and no apparent use for the jet powered wheelchair, Allegro Medical sought the rights to produce the jet chair. The deal crafted with the State Department allows for limited production of the jet powered wheelchair as a recreational use personal transportation device. The stripped down civilian version of the craft is notably missing rocket launchers and heat-seeking missiles.

Safety first. Always wear a helmet and fire-retardant underwear when operating a jet powered wheelchair. (Underwear sold separately).

Experimental aircraft restrictions apply.

Time out. We're kidding! This is NOT a real product.

TSA Makes Amputee Take Pants off in Public

2008-07-23T22:06:00Z

Here's a disturbing article about how the TSA seems to be abusing their power and making unreasonable demands upon passengers that could be averted with a bit of common sense (CBS Chicago, via Boing Boing):

-----------

When travelers go to the airport, they know what kind of security to expect: luggage searches, metal detectors and shoe inspections.

It's all part of our post 9-11 reality enforced by the Transportation Security Adminstration. But as CBS 2 Investigator Pam Zekman reports, thousands of travelers have complained that some of these screenings can become abusive and even x-rated.

In Chicago, people like Robert Perry are subjected to exhaustive security checks. He was patted down, his wheel chair was examined and his hands were swabbed, all in public view in a see-through room at the security checkpoint. Perry, 71, is not alone

"It's humiliation," Perry said.

Perry was also taken to a see-through room by a TSA agent when his artificial knee set off the metal detector.

"He yelled at me to get the belt off. 'I told you to get the belt off.' So I took the belt off. He ran his hands down over and pulled the pants down, they went down around my ankle," Perry said.

At that point, Perry was standing in his underwear in public view. He asked to see a supervisor. That made things worse.

"She was yelling 'I have power, I have power, I have power," Perry said. The power to stop him from flying to Florida with his wife that day to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary.

"It makes you feel like you have no rights," Perry said.

Perry said he always alerts TSA agents about his metal knee and wonders why they can't just check his leg.

"If somebody told me that I would save the people on the airplane by taking my pants off out in public out there, I wouldn't mind doing it, but this was not necessary," Perry said.

TSA officials said that when the metal detectors go off, their agents must resolve what caused the alarm. But experts have said it's important to use common sense when balancing security and customer service.

ADA Anniversary and the National Forum on Disability Issues

2008-07-23T20:08:00Z

Disaboom will be presenting a live Webcast of the National Forum on Disability Issues this Saturday from 12:30pm to 4:00pm, ET. The Forum is being held in Columbus, OH.

The event will commemorate the 18th anniversary of our civil rights law, the Americans with Disabilities Act and will feature time slots for the presidential candidates to individually present their visions for the future of disability policy in America followed by questions by Judy Woodruff, news anchor and journalist ("The News Hour with Jim Lehrer"), who will act as the Moderator.

The latest news is that John McCain will be personally participating via satellite. Barack Obama will not be participating personally in the event, but is sending Senator Tom Harkin in his stead.

If you're not able to view the live webcast you can come back and watch it later, so whether or not you're able to view it live be sure to head on over and sign up to view the event.

I will be attending the event along with Dan Lawton. You can expect pictures, live-blogging and regular reports from us (hopefully some interviews too!) to be published on the Disabled Politico blog.

New 'Tongue Drive System' for Wheelchairs

2008-07-23T00:10:00Z

Via Wired (read their article for the rest of the story):

Quadriplegics may gain a new degree of freedom via their tongues, if a new control system becomes widely available.

The new system uses that famously strong, agile and sensitive muscle, the tongue, to provide computer accessibility and wheelchair control to severely disabled people.

Designed by researchers for people with debilitating spinal cord injuries and diseases, the tongue-drive tech takes advantage of the nearly direct connection between the tongue and the brain via cranial nerves, which makes it particularly likely to remain functional, even after severe accidents.