Engineer Improves Lives With the Blink of an Eye - Dr. Chau marries cutting-edge electronics and medicine to revolutionize rehabilitation

12-15-2005

By TERRENCE BELFORD

Deep in the basement of Toronto's Bloorview MacMillan Children's Centre, in a converted laundry room, Dr. Tom Chau is using technology to revolutionize pediatric rehabilitation.

Physicians and therapists have traditionally focused on curing or reversing disabilities. If there was no hope for either, medicine looked on its work as a failure. Not Dr. Chau.

The 35-year-old award-winning engineer has spent six years creating new ways children with temporary or long-term disabilities can use whatever mobility they have to tackle day-to-day challenges most people take for granted.

With his devices, children can use the blink of an eye or the wiggle of a finger to trigger a computer that lets them communicate with their parents or caregivers. Dr. Chau has harnessed the ultra-low-frequency sounds of muscles to activate and control prosthetic arms. He has taken an approach used to monitor quality on assembly lines and created a lightweight neckband that sounds an alarm when a child has difficulty swallowing. A computer-driven system allows children to play tunes on a simulated piano even though their small hands may be incapable of striking a single key. He has also created a table-like sensing device that enables therapists to accurately measure a child's ability to grip a pen or pencil and exert enough pressure to progress to learning to write.

"Nobody has even looked at that since the 1950s," he says. "Yet it is essential to be able to measure a child's abilities before therapists can decide whether to abandon trying to teach the child to write."

Dr. Chau's work is breaking new ground in the way health care professionals look at disabilities, says Dr. Peter Rosenbaum, Canada Research Chair in pediatric disability at Hamilton's McMaster University and former chief of medical staff at Bloorview MacMillan.

"He is making an enormous difference in the lives of both disabled children and their parents," he says. "If the child can blink a single eye, Tom will find a way to use technology to restore some elements of normal life to that child."

The key, says Dr. Chau, who speaks in tones as soothing as silk, is to accept a child's limitations, find out what the child is able to do, and build on that.

Dr. Chau and his team of two postdoctoral fellows, 10 graduate students and half a dozen undergraduates use off-the-shelf PCs and monitors, new and existing software, advanced circuitry, tiny microphones and space-age materials to craft one-of-a-kind devices, some of which may find widespread commercial applications.

Their small laboratory operates on a modest budget of $600,000 a year. It has waist-high Formica shelving piled with electronic components, looking more like the back room of a strip mall computer repair shop than a world-class laboratory.

Yet world-class it is. Dr. Chau last year was granted a prestigious Canada Research Chair in pediatric rehabilitation, which guarantees him a five-year grant of $500,000 annually. This year he won the Ontario Professional Engineers' Young Engineer of the Year award.

The money allows him to continue with his work and the recognition may help attract private donors -- to date, his laboratory has been operated on a shoestring. When he decided to leave a lucrative job at IBM Canada six years ago, Bloorview MacMillan welcomed him -- as long as he could find his own funding.

"The first few months were spent writing grant applications," he says. "I was lucky and found one fairly quickly, enough at least to pay me a small salary."

The $44,000 a year he drew for the next five years was less than half what he had been earning at IBM. Yet the emotional and intellectual rewards more than made up for the monetary loss, says the father of two (a third child is on the way). "Besides, my wife Grace is a very understanding woman."

Dr. Chau's father Frank was an engineer, and he credits his mother Irene with his dedication to improving the life of disabled children. She worked in palliative care at the old Riverdale Hospital, focusing on lending support and comfort to Chinese patients, many of whom spoke no English and had no relatives in the city. "I could see from her work the difference she made in people's lives," he says.

"When I graduated, I got a job with IBM working with a team that was re-engineering the processes at a Milton plastics plant," he adds. "I did well, they paid me good money, they even gave me an award. But I quickly realized this was not how I wanted to spend my life."

Instead, Dr. Chau saw enormous opportunities to use existing and leading-edge technology to greatly improve the lot of children. Take the Aspirometer as an example. Children suffering from throat cancer, birth defects or a host of other conditions often can't swallow very well. Dr. Chau borrowed from industry to create a throat band with a sensor, linked wirelessly to a processor and an alarm. The sensor recognizes the physical signature that proper swallowing creates, just as industrial sensors recognize the signature of production equipment operating as it should. If the signature varies, the processor knows something is wrong and triggers an alarm, alerting caregivers.

For amputees or those with birth defects, Dr. Chau's team created a subway-token sized microphone embedded in a tiny square of hard gel. The microphone picks up the low frequency sounds muscle and bone makes when performing physical movements. Those tiny sounds can then be used to trigger movement in an artificial hand.

An Ottawa company is now looking at using the Aspirometer technology in marketable devices, and a Mississauga company is considering commercial application of the prosthetics microphone.

Dr. Chau's newest research is into how cerebral palsy affects children's ability to walk. Walking, he explains, comes from a combination of stored memory and the ability of the brain to plan ahead. Cerebral palsy creates a disconnect between the two.

"If we can identify that disconnect, we might be able to find ways to deal with it," he says.

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