“Watch someone with a walking aid in the winter,” says Dr. Geoff Fernie. “Watch them cross the road or climb a curb or try to get over even a tiny drift of snow. It’s very tricky and dangerous.”

As Vice-President, Research, of the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, Dr. Fernie is familiar with the daily challenges facing people recovering from an injury, coping with a disability, or simply dealing with the effects of aging. And he knows the limitations of the current technology available to assist them. “Often,” he says, “it just doesn’t work very well.”

That’s likely to change, thanks to research that will take place in a suite of state-of-the-art labs the Institute is building in downtown Toronto. The facility is known as iDAPT, for Intelligent Design for Adaptation, Participation and Technology.

One of iDAPT’s high-tech marvels will be the Challenging Environment Assessment Laboratory. The lab is designed around a massive hydraulic motion platform that can carry a variety of research modules. One of these “payloads” will be a chamber capable of reproducing sub-zero temperatures with snow and ice conditions, even if it’s July on the streets of Toronto three stories above. “We’ll be able to simulate slopes and jiggle them, challenge people’s balance,” enthuses Dr. Fernie, “and we’ll be able to do it in a snow storm, on a real ice surface.” Concepts and equipment tested here may lead to better solutions for winter mobility.

The iDAPT facility will also reproduce the interior of a single-storey house—to test technologies that help people live at home longer—as well as contain a space that reflects a hospital or nursing home environment.



In all, iDAPT will comprise 17 labs, workshops, centres and studios, built and equipped with the funding participation of the Ontario Innovation Trust. “When it’s complete,” says Dr. Fernie, “it will be way ahead of anything else, anywhere in the world.” For that reason, iDAPT has also been designed to accommodate visiting researchers and their projects, with features like extra bookable office space and the “payload” orientation of the environmental assessment lab.

The remarkable range of facilities at iDAPT is already matched by the range of its researchers. “We have people here from physiotherapy,” explains Dr. Fernie, “from speech and language pathology, from geography, from engineering and from industry. We have patients and clinicians, even Ministry of Health people making policy decisions. It creates quite an exciting atmosphere, a buzz.

“Once upon a time rehabilition was seen basically as lifting weights. But we’re demonstrating that this is really cutting edge stuff.”