Alistair Burt MP visits Toronto

Minister Alistair Burt, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, made a quick visit to Canada last week (North America is among his many geographical responsibilities) and spent a day taking in the highlights of Toronto.

SIN co-managed a visit to OCE Discovery, Ontario’s headline research-to-commercialisation trade show, and to Toronto Rehab (which the High Commissioner visited a few months ago).

OCE Discovery was a very large space stuffed with booths displaying the latest innovations to come out of Ontario’s fertile universities and laboratories.

Lacking the time to try out everything there (e.g. remote-controlled and autonomous robots for exploring sewers, headsets to control an iPad using only your brain waves, wheelchairs that skate on ice and algae that scrub CO2 from factories), Mr. Burt made a beeline for some folding electric bikes and spent a good amount of time zipping up and down the carpet (the booth operators would later refer to him as a “speed demon”).

He also showed great interest in semi-autonomous surveillance aircraft, used in Canada for monitoring agricultural, silvicultural and mining operations and carrying British engines.

Back at Toronto Rehab, we took a look at HomeLab and saw the Microsoft Kinect-controlled automated fall recognition system demonstrated. A hardy researcher “fell” in the living room and spent a few minutes talking back-and-forth with the system to establish whether he needed help or not.

Minister Burt volunteered to test out the air-powered auto-running lifting straps, sparing me the (minor) ignominy of doing it again. After a trip to the iDAPT/CEAL, we headed back upstairs for a meet-and-greet with the student researchers and a quick summary of the incredibly varied innovations that they were coming up with.

SIN Canada has worked with Toronto Rehab before on ageing projects, and will be looking at ways to get more British students out to do research there in the near future.

If you are running a similarly world-leading rehabilitation science laboratory in the UK, feel free to get in touch!