Featured Speakers

I Can Drive! Exploring Self-Controlled Powered Mobility

Tim Adlam, PhD, CEng, CSci, Associate Professor, Global Disability
Innovation Hub; Director, Disability, Design and Innovation; Principal Engineer,
Designability, University College, London, UK

Dr Tim Adlam is an Associate Professor of Global Disability Innovation at University College London; and Principal Engineer at Designability in Bath, UK. With academic, clinical and charity partners, he is leading research in seating and mobility to create technology for participation, supporting children to do what they want to do. Tim is also director of the UCL multidisciplinary MSc in Disability, Design and Innovation; delivered by UCL, Loughborough University and the London College of Fashion to equip innovators with the skills and knowledge they need to tackle complex challenges in disability and international development. For over 20 years, Tim has worked with children and adults with physical and neurological disability, to create technology that is useful, usable, beautiful and viable.

Lisbeth Nilsson, PhD, Reg OT, Independent Researcher, Department of Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

Dr. Lisbeth Nilsson, is a specialist in occupational therapy and associated lecturer and researcher in Occupational Therapy and Occupational Science group at Lund University, Sweden. She developed the intervention Driving to Learn™ in powered wheelchair for people with profound cognitive disabilities. Her special interests are tool use learning and how to assess and facilitate the learning process. She and her collaborator Josephine Durkin, PhD, UK, developed the Assessment of Learning Powered mobility use (ALP). Her current focus is implementation of the ALP tool in the field of assistive technology. More information can be found at her home page www.lisbethnilsson.se/en and at her ResearchGate profile https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Lisbeth_Nilsson

 

Technology to Overcome the Big Problems of Aging

Geoff Fernie, CM, PhD, PEng, CEng, FCAHS, Creaghan Family Chair in Prevention and Healthcare Technologies Department of Surgery, University of Toronto and Toronto Rehabilitation Institute – UHN, Toronto, ON

Professor Geoff Fernie is the Creaghan Family Chair in Prevention and Healthcare Technologies, Department of Surgery, University of Toronto and at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute. He is a bioengineer who applies engineering to solve problems in medicine and healthcare. During his tenure as Director of the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute from 2003 to 2018, he grew the research institute to be the top rehabilitation research centre Ssin the world.

Dr. Fernie’s passion is the search for practical solutions to common problems of daily living for an aging population, people with disabilities and their caregivers. His emphasis is on preventing accidents, injuries and illnesses

Dr. Fernie has a track record of taking inventions from the laboratory to market and has helped to launch several companies.  He has over 150 peer-reviewed journal papers/ book chapters and has been awarded nearly 50 patents.

Dr Fernie is a member of the Order of Canada.

Community Mobility 101: A Modern Primer

James (Cole) Galloway, PT, PhD, FAPTA, Professor, University of Delaware; Founder, Go Baby Go, Newark, DE, USA

Dr. Galloway’s “blue collar futurist” approach guides his collaborative work on supporting individuals in the co-creation of their world through mobility. His interests in human behavior, families, music, comedy, design thinking and social justice mix effortlessly with his professional background of rehabilitation, neuroscience, child development, human-machine interaction, dynamic systems concepts and open source culture.

His team’s research and device development work — focused on the key role of social mobility in life — serves to unapologetically challenge the out of date cultures of pediatric and adult rehabilitation with a highly hopeful set of alternative products and processes. His current focus is on the impact of modified ride on cars, body weight harnesses placed in the real world, swarms of smart toys and on the research and manufacturing power of k-12 STEM/STEAM classrooms.

He works within Go Baby Go – a +150 chapter research, education and advocacy human rights movement composed of researchers, clinicians, families and a wide range of lay communities. His approach of combining high tech and low tech into “go tech” has garnered 20 yrs of funding, awards and partnerships with top tier organizations including the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Department of Education, the Smithsonian’s American History Museum, the medical technology and toy industries such as Fisher Price, Mattel and the American Physical Therapy Association.