Moving on, here come a few mildly interesting points, like needles in a mudaneity haystack.
First, I started occupational therapy last Wednesday! This stuff focuses more on hand/wrist stuff and other fine motor skills as applied real world style. Sessions are MWF afternoons. So far, it's just been evaluation and some experimentation to figure out what to work on. Meetings are only about 45min! After spending 3h at a time up in PT, these sessions barely show up on the temporal radar.
Coolest thing we've done so far: submerged e-stim. Get FES e-stim equipment and a bucket. Fill bucket with water. Stick one electrode in water. Attach other electrode to forearm. Place hand in water. Turn on electricity. Watch magic.
Upstairs at PT, Wednesday was typical Giger-->weights-->FES bike. Woohoo. Friday was out of order; first was Giger, then a cut ahead to the zapcycle for circa 1h15min. Then...
I got to try out a manual chair with special grips to compensate for my lack of, umm, grip. Let me describe poorly. A typical manual chair essentially just has a smaller wheel attached to each of the large back wheels; to move, the user grabs and pushes forward or backward as necessary. You already knew that.
This chair instead had wider, flat, semi-sticky rims in place of the "smaller wheels". Then the idea is that the user may place the palms on the flat rim part, thumbs forward, and use the friction to push around. This eliminates the need for significant dexterity - where a tight grasp is necessary (or at least a huge advantage) in an average Joe chair, fingers aren't used with these flat rims. Gloves with sticky palms further improve the effect. So, someone with shoulder/arm/back muscles but no hand control may implement such a chair to move manually.
I try to be one of those people. I made two laps around the track, extremely slowly and with quite a bit of assistance, for a total of around 200 meters. Pretty pathetic, huh. I'm a wimp. To give myself a tiny bit of credit, though, the grip gloves I was using did not even remotely fit (must acquit!); also, as is evident in the picture, I am enormous and ordinary manual chairs are designed for munchkins. Oh well. BTW, the chest/shoulder wrap is obviously a fashion statement.
This implementation of manual chair propulsion for those with minimal dexterity is relatively common - I had seen chairs with similar flat rims in my time at the RISL. A less common style, which I had assumed to exist but not seen until coming to Detroit, is to have pegs (projections!) coming out of the otherwise-unmodified "smaller wheel" type of grips. I always think of these as being like the wheel at the helm of a pirate ship... Imagine as you wish. With such rims, the user may push the palms or thumbs against these pegs for propulsion. These are what I was and still am hoping for, but no appropriately-equipped chairs are readily available here. According to basic physics, these make more sense than the flat+sticky kind: all of the user's energy is directed tangent to the wheel - the direction that actually causes rotation, and therefore motion - rather than expending some energy non-tangentially to create enough friction to rotate the wheels. Since I'm such a pathetic weakling, I don't really have enough strength to direct some away from movement and still expect to go anywhere. We'll see how it goes, matey.
Pack pack pack. Thanks for checking in. Palabra.
JOHN
ReplyDeletethat's so fantastic. they better be getting the pirate king an appro vessel, is all i have to say. or someone's walking the plank...into canada...
also jeez 200m you're my hero. for real.
kyle.