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CAD Helps Make Videoconferencing a Tonic For Sick Kids Susan Maclean

CAD has saved lives, saved time and saved costs. CAD has been used to help make our world a safer place through its use in vehicle crash simulations. It has increased the convenience of the many products we use. It has reduced the cost of manufacturing so that we can afford more products. Now, it is helping to shatter children’s lonely isolation through illness or disability by letting them stay in contact with their classmates.

CAD is being used in the design of a child-height, egg-shaped robot on wheels that acts as a surrogate classmate for children confined to hospital. With a computer screen face and a video camera forehead, it transmits a live audio-visual image of what’s happening in the classroom via a high-speed access ISDN line to a hospital unit at the student’s bedside. The hospitalized student controls the classroom robot via the hospital unit which transmits a full-sized, live audio-visual image of the student's face in the screen of the classroom robot.

Using a game-pad control, the hospitalized student can turn the video camera in the classroom unit left, right, up and down, zooming it in and out, adjust focus and control audio as well as respond to the teacher – and fellow classmates -- by raising a mechanical hand. The student can see and hear what is going on in the classroom and be seen and heard by classmates.

Both the yellow school module (black is available for older grades) and the purple hospital module each run with an IBM IntelliStation E-Pro with300 MHz, 32MB and 2GB hard drive, a 15-inch monitor and a pan tilt 8X zoom auto exposure camera.

Pilot studies at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children and hospitals in Vancouver, Montreal, northern Ontario, and Kleinburg, ON, are proving the units effectively allow a student to participate in typical classroom tasks and may even reduce trauma levels as well as health care costs.

Originally trademarked PEBBLES as an acronym for Providing Education by Bringing Learning Environments to Students, its official name is now Wayne Gretzky’s PEBBLES to reflect the additional charitable contribution by the Wayne Gretzky/Bay team. One dollar is being donated for every clothing item in the Wayne Gretzky Collection sold by the Bay.

(Ed: Wayne Gretzky is a retired North American hockey hero. PEBBLES is on of his manu charitable causes)

The project is a collaborative effort between Ryerson Polytechnical University, the University of Toronto and Telbotics Inc. with contributions from the Royal Bank of Canada, the Province of Ontario and the federal government.

Ryerson's involvement has been to design and develop the software including the game pad interface, integrate the system components, conduct the clinical studies and publish the results. The original product concept was designed by a University of Toronto student using AutoCAD.

Toronto-based Telbotics is responsible for the industrial design of the units as well as promoting their purchase as educational tools by various governments. Wayne Gretzky’s PEBBLES has sparked keen interest in the U.S. as well as within the Ministry of Education in the Netherlands.

Graham Smith, founder and chief technology officer of Telbotics, is inventor of the patented Telbot technology. The company applies the technology to produce "telepresence" products that enhance the sense of physical presence between a single user and a group during a videoconference. Standard video conferencing is too technically advanced for children and provides only limited presence - a remote user's face on a static two-dimensional monitor. Combining telepresence with robotics has resulted in what Telbotics describes as "technology so simple it turns video conferencing into child’s play."

Smith’s challenge now is to refine the research prototype design so the modules can be readily manufactured. He hopes to bring the current $59,000 price tag for the two-unit system down to $40,000. To that end, he is working with Nelson Industrial Inc., a custom sheet metal fabricator in Pickering, ON., which designs, manufactures and assembles the units.

Last year, Smith used Solid Edge for the first time as he and mechanical engineer Miroslav Mitrovic, consulting designer at Nelson Industrial, improved the manufacturing attributes of the hospital unit. Mitrovic has been an enthusiastic Solid Edge user for many years and is completely sold on its speed, ease of use, flexibility, completeness, vendor support and more.

"It can cut time from design so you can spend more time modeling," he adds. "If you need to change something, you can go back as many steps as you like and change your design instead of starting from scratch. You can enjoy modeling and improve a design all at the same time."

Miroslav further adds that the program's compatibility with Microsoft Excel has effectively reduced drawing calculation time from hours to only a few minutes.

He says its compatibility with Microsoft Office allows Excel to drive the model’s dimensioning, which reduces drawing time from hours to minutes.

Nelson Industrial runs three seats of Solid Edge on Intergraph TD and uses the software for a surprisingly diverse range of applications. Mitrovic reports that they design and then cut, form and assemble a variety of metal storage cabinets and many architectural products, including access doors, security window screens and ceiling and wall systems. He clearly enjoys the design challenge presented by complex custom ceiling and wall applications for many prestigious institutional projects through North America. The most recent was Nelson Industrial's involvement with a US$45 million mock-up facility for a new state-of-the-art trading complex for the New York Stock Exchange slated to open this month. Nelson Industrial modeled the architect's complex, formed metal requirements so potential site problems could be reviewed and corrected well in advance of the arrival of the finished products. Mitrovic notes that clients as well as the installing contractors, welcome the opportunity to review and critique the designs in an easily understood 3D format, before the products are built and shipped to the job site.

For the PEBBLES project, he modestly credits Solid Edge for the one-piece door in the hospital unit which he claims could not have been created with most other CAD software.

Smith had used AutoCAD previously and reports his main complaint is the lack of full compatibility of files between major software. "It is difficult for someone in my position who uses different subcontractors."

While he likes to be able to touch and feel a product, he is quick to admit the advantages of CAD.

"A lot of the things we’re building are kinetic," he says. "You can animate parts of it to see how the cabling is going to work and what might get in the way. We’re dealing with aesthetic issues now, and by using CAD we can understand what it is going to look like when we make a change.

"We decided to cut down the height and we could see immediately what the effects were going to be," he recalls. "The door had to open and we could get an idea of how that was going to work and if there would be any problems with the door hitting any cabling."

PEBBLES was designed in SolidEdge by the joint efforts of consulting designer Miroslav Mitrovic and engineering manager B. Yeoman of Nelson International.

Smith estimates that about $2.5 million has been spent on developing PEBBLES to date – which he says is "actually very cheap for technology at this level."

The focus now is on redesigning the classroom unit to make it more readily manufactured. Longer range plans are to try to combine some functionality of both units into one to make it smaller, lighter and cheaper. He will also be working on a more portable home-based system similar to a suitcase that one would open up for wireless video conferencing. He predicts that may be more like a year away.

In all of this, CAD will be playing a major role, he says. "CAD is a very, very powerful tool to cut costs and create a much more high end product."

That is certainly welcome news for hospitalized children currently cut off from their schooling and classmates.

Originally publishing in CAD Systems Magazine.

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