Acknowledgements
It is now just over a week after the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition, and I am happy to report that everything worked!
Our model demo did not crash, our connectivity circuit was completed and taken apart about a hundred times without any problems, and our stand only partly collapsed once (but we quickly put it up again). Our volunteers had thousands of chats with visitors, and not once did they start chasing me with a body-powered hook, yelling they’ve had enough of prosthetics (I’m sure they must have thought about it though).
I spent this last week not thinking about prosthetics, but I am now ready to revisit the exhibition. In a future post I will talk about the quality of the visitor interactions and go over some of the feedback we received, but today I just want to focus on one thing.
Our exhibit was very well received, and its success is thanks to a select group of people. If this was my Oscar acceptance speech, now would be the time when I would reach into my dress pocket (because my dress would have pockets, obvs) take out a metre-long list and attempt to read it all before the play-off music started. So here goes.
Ed and I would like to thank*:
Alex Rowley, Ben McManus and Chris Davis from Wavemaker, Stoke-on-Trent’s community makerspace. Let’s be honest, without them there would have been no exhibit: they designed and constructed the entire thing. They even laser-cut an orange perspex prosthetic hand necklace for me!
Rachel Reddihough from the New Vic Borderlines. Rachel shared her extremely deep knowledge of public engagement with us, inspired many of our activities and demo ideas, and hosted our team at the theatre. I’ll be working with the amazing Borderlines team in another project that starts soon, so you’ll hear about them again :)
Kirsty Dolphin and Tom Maurice, our Keele University press officers. They put together our exhibit video and press release, made the effort to really understand our research and stayed away from sensationalist headlines. They were so patient with me when I refused to get in front of the camera, that they somehow convinced me to do it…!?
Finally, our amazing volunteers:
Biology and Psychology graduate Alice Faux-Nightingale, Medical student Luke Western, Biomedical Engineering MSc students Pavandeep Bilkhu, James Everington, Mick Prince and Ash Kimberley, PhD students in Bioengineering Hati Kose-Dunn and Neuroscience Matt Kose-Dunn, and post-doctoral researchers in Bioengineering Abbie Rutter and the Social Sciences Helen Millward.
You’ll notice that I linked to their LinkedIn profiles above. That’s because most of them are or will soon be in the job market, and I can’t recommend them enough. They were all enthusiastic from start to finish, and had very knowledgeable conversations with our visitors, even though prosthetics is not the area of expertise for most of them. I am extremely proud of them!
So what’s next? First, a holiday (in Shetland, on bicycles, with a tent). Then, the conclusion to our open experiment. Having put you through post after modelling post, the least I can do is answer the question we’ve been looking into together: does our model correctly identify the hand movements of our volunteers, based on their muscle activity? And more importantly: can I seamlessly integrate the answer with photos of Shetland ponies and puffins?
*Here I’m focusing on the Keele team, but we also owe huge thanks to Hannah and her team from Newcastle Uni!
