High Commissioner visits Toronto Rehab

SIN Toronto had the pleasure of a visit by the High Commissioner last week, and took the opportunity (with the Consul-General) to get a tour of the state-of-the-art facilities over at Toronto Rehab. After a cordial chat covering research collaboration, rehabilitation science and the Paralympics (Dr. Gaétan Tardif, Chief Medical Officer at Toronto Rehab, is the Chef de Mission of Team Canada for the London 2012 Paralympic Games), we were shown round two of Toronto Rehab’s flagship installations within the $36 M iDAPT Centre for Rehabilitation Research – the Challenging Environment Assessment Lab (CEAL) and HomeLab.

The CEAL is a vast subterranean facility, housing several large pods that can recreate various environments (ice, snow, stairs, slopes etc.) and a motion platform. When researchers want to simulate a certain kind of environment, they hoist the appropriate pod onto the platform and monitor how people walk and react under various conditions. The picture above shows the High Commissioner in a virtual street environment, designed to test assistive and public safety innovations in an almost-real environment without risking accidents.

HomeLab is essentially a home within a laboratory, where researchers can test out assistive technologies in a “real” home to see how they might work when deployed more widely. One of the key aims of Toronto Rehab’s research is to ensure that older people and people with disabilities can stay in their own homes longer, increasing independence and reducing the need for costly long-term care facilities. We can’t actually talk about any of the technologies we saw due to commercial confidentiality, but you can expect to see some serious innovations in home care over the next few years, from simple new ways of moving people to automated fall monitoring.

With an ageing population and healthcare costs showing no sign of decreasing, this kind of research and testing is attracting more attention. We hope to link Toronto Rehab with some UK centres of excellence in the near future to help get these innovations into wider use.