Professor Tom Chau’s work in creating devices to improve the lives of disabled children has received a huge funding boost, as the researcher has been named the Canada Research Chair in Paediatric Rehabilitation Engineering.
Chau, with his team of clinicians, therapists, physicians, students and engineers, serve thousands of children with brain injuries, amputated limbs, and debilitating afflictions such as spina bifida, cerebral palsy and muscular dystrophy. His lab is home to many state-of-the-art devices, including prosthetic hands that convert sounds and vibratory signals into mechanical actions, enabling kids to grip things. The Aspiratometer, designed for kids with severe muscular diseases (who often cannot speak, and must be fed by others), uses sound signals to alert caregivers if a disabled child is swallowing food improperly and in danger of choking.
Working with disabled children can be a huge mental challenge, but Chau finds it to be a very rewarding experience.
“Our job is to improve the quality of every life we touch, both the child’s and their parents,” he says. “Once I worked in the corporate world, where I sat in front of a computer designing circuits, and everything was done for the profits at the end of the day. That didn’t do it for me. I wanted something with human contact, to make a difference.”
The Virtual Music Instrument has empowered Kajan Vigneswaran, 11, suffering from spinal muscular atrophy, with the ability to master many musical instruments, including the guitar and piano. “I was nervous initially, but it went well” he says, talking about his first recital at school. A giant TV screen setup in front of him has huge multi-coloured balloons, each representing a different musical note. With his image superimposed on the screen from a small video camera focused on him, he creates music by waving his hand across each coloured ball.
“The needs of these kids are not static, so the technology needs to be dynamic,” says Chau. “We want to focus not on what they can’t do, but on what they can. This concept is called ‘functional intent’. A key goal is to endow our devices with the ability to evolve. We want to move the onus from the individual adapting to technology, to technology adapting to individuals.”
The prestigious Canada Research Chair position came with a five-year, $500,000 federal grant to continue the Prism Lab work at the hospital. But this is not nearly enough, says Chau, as many disabled children still wait for help. He says governments, grant boards and foundations are far more willing to direct scarce health care research dollars to efforts which promise dramatic results, or with the potential to end high-profile diseases. It is a much tougher task to find funding for treatments or technologies for disabled kids who will never leave their wheelchairs, or those fated to die young.
