Michel Goyette, eng
The gait laboratory of the Institute of rehabilitation of Montreal was designed with an aim of making qualitative and quantitative evaluations of the step and/or balance. This system includes/understands a walkway of 32-feet length, a force platform located approximately at the center of this walkway, a camera making it possible to film the subjects, as well as apparatuses allowing the data acquisition (such as amplifiers, filters, etc). This laboratory is at present at the fine point of technology in this field and allows us to evaluate the subjects who are distinguished between a step normal and pathological and thus to be able to make the processing on the points which cause this abnormal step.
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Being part of a multidisciplinary group including engineers, occupational therapists,
physiotherapists have created a biarticular dynamometer allowing the measurement of forces and couples in the lower (legs) and superiors (arms) limbs. This dynamometer reads the forces by using various sensors placed on the members of the subjects. These forces can be transformed thereafter into moments. The results are presented thereafter to the subject in real time thus enabling him to control its efforts (biological feedback or biofeedback). The system can be coupled with a force platform. All acquisition is done thanks to a user-friendly software allowing a person having little knowledge in the computers to proceed without much efforts.
Article in the "Forum" of the Université de Montréal.(in french)
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Apparatus used to fatigue ligaments. A maximum of six ligaments (tied at both extremities with claws) can be tested. In collaboration with another engineer, we have created the control system of this apparatus. The control consisted of a software supervising the applied forces on the ligaments in real time. When certains limits were atteined, the apparatus had to be stopped. A display of the applied forces and other parameters were also presented to the experimenter.
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Set up and installation of the software part of the space shuttle simulation (Space Camp Canada) by adapting it to the Québec context (bilingual).
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Automated direct entry forms
Transformation of a method where the students entered information of their training course on paper forms which were then transferred to the processing service from the University for generation of statistics. The results were then entered manually in the form of reports/ratios which were sent thereafter to the various institutions offering the training courses. All the forms were computerized and the statistics are now calculated on the spot with automatic generation of the reports/ratios for each institution.
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Bulletin Board System Network
With other engineers, we assembled a communication network per computer by using the method of the electronic babillards allowing in the majority of the engineers of Montérégie (southshore of Montréal) to communicate (electronic mail, news of regional, file transfers, etc) between them without interurban expenses while using a user-friendly interface. This network functions since 1994.
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