By Ryan Murphy
The Virginian-Pilot

Jun 20, 2018

NORFOLK

Rising sea levels are a massive threat to Hampton Roads and its economy. How can local governments tackle such a huge problem?

By betting on the little guys.

That’s the logic behind the nonprofit RISE, which will fund small businesses that are working on solutions to flooding and other problems caused by climate change and sinking land.

RISE is looking to deal with the problems of a rising tide while turning the potential economic ruin into a growth industry.

The group just received $10 million in state and federal funding to spend over the next five years. It’s put out the call for its first $1.2 million challenge: If you’ve got an idea, come fight for a slice. (You’ve got until September to apply.)

Dozens of entrepreneurs who think they’ve got a million-dollar idea showed up to a recent workshop at the Slover Library to hone their pitches, which range from a $50 sensor to detect when a road is flooded, to community laboratories.

If RISE thinks any of those projects have potential and – this is key – have a legitimate business plan to back them up, they may be in line for some seed money.

Down the road, the businesses could net potentially lucrative contracts with governments in Hampton Roads.

RISE’s ultimate hope: that the businesses take their concepts worldwide and Hampton Roads becomes a hub for the business of resiliency.

But first, it has to start with an idea.

On the sixth floor of the Slover Library one Thursday in May, the pitches ranged from why-didn’t-I-think-of-that concepts to head-scratchers.

A Navy lieutenant talked through the logistics of turning old cruise ships into floating apartment blocks. One woman described her idea for environmental labs open for public use in poor neighborhoods.

One man pitched “Waze for waterways,” an application where users would populate a map with boating hazards, environmental issues and wildlife on and around the area’s rivers and coasts.

Professors from Old Dominion University, researchers from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science and representatives from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were on hand to help a room full of hopeful entrepreneurs hone their resilience ideas and hash out their business plans.

“There were some pretty cool ideas, and a few need work,” said Paul Robinson, a former aerospace engineer and business owner who now serves as RISE’s executive director.

Some ideas were little more than a twinkle in their creator’s eye, while others were further along.

A pair of engineers showed off a prototype for a dirt-cheap sensor to detect street flooding. Comparable sensors can cost thousands of dollars – these could do a lot of the same work at a fraction of the cost. Scattering them around the city could help build a real-time model of flooding and gather data for predictive analysis.

That got the attention of Norfolk’s emergency manager, Jim Redick.

The city has to rely on tidal data to try to predict flooding, which neglects precipitation, making accurate predictions difficult.

“The predictive analysis would be huge for us,” Redick said. “Do people need to move their car?”

Redick says he’d use a sensor network like that in a heartbeat.

Then, Redick’s imagination kicked into high gear. Rather than just an alert, the sensor network could automatically trigger folding signs or barriers to prevent motorists from entering flooded streets.

“The sexy thing to me is that arm that goes down.”

RISE doesn’t aim to fight back against sea level rise directly, but rather to give small businesses the tools to tackle the problem.

“We don’t make up the topics,” Robinson said. “Cities approach us (and say) ‘Find an innovative solution to my problem.’ ”

Katerina Oskarsson, the other half of RISE’s two-person staff, said it can be tough for small companies to sell products aimed at large problems.

They’re often too expensive for private customers. Governments might have the money, but their procurement processes can be hard for small firms to navigate.

“Cities are very risk averse,” Oskarsson said. “They don’t tend to buy products from startups. They don’t want them to go out of business.”

That’s where RISE comes in.

By working with small companies from the ground up, it can help them tailor their pitches and ultimately navigate the byzantine rules for doing business with local governments.

RISE – the “coastal resilience accelerator” that was called for as part of a $120 million grant Virginia won from the federal government in 2016 – says it can also help shorten the lag time between a company’s idea and a go-ahead from the city.

In some localities, an entrepreneur looking to run a pilot program can spend 18 months seeking a permit, only to be told no. Robinson said RISE can help get an answer from the city within a day.

The group is also developing a citywide wireless internet network that would be able to connect, for instance, a fleet of sensors. RISE secured the OK to mount Wi-Fi transmitters on city buildings.

Bigger cities like Boston have their own innovation departments, but RISE sees itself filling that role for Hampton Roads cities. It hopes to cultivate an entrepreneur economy and increase the number of high-tech jobs in the region.

One business that wants to be part of that future is Ario, a five-person startup working on a sort of universal augmented-reality system.

Ario’s app uses your phone’s camera to display the world around you, overlaid with information on things that have been tagged. Point the camera at a drill press in a machine shop, and the app could bring up operating instructions or maintenance history.

The company has won several recent honors, including one from NATO recognizing the app’s potential in a disaster zone. Imagine, amid the chaos of a recovery operation, being able to hold your phone up to a truckload full of medicine or food and immediately see where it’s supposed to be headed.

Ario’s ability to tag objects and locations could help local governments deal with recurrent flooding.

A city employee who drives by a flooded drain or downed power line could drop a virtual pin with details. That information could be seen by a dispatcher at headquarters and the work crew that arrives on scene.

This kind of project is everything Robinson said RISE is looking for: a local company with a solution that could be used here to tackle flooding – but also has potential far beyond Norfolk.

“The entire world is looking at Hampton Roads’ problem,” Oskarsson said.

Ryan Murphy, 757-446-2299, ryan.murphy@pilotonline.com

Research on Balance Therapy Goes Virtual

Virtual Grocery Store Could be New Model for Therapy

by Linda Joy

University of Pittsburgh virtual reality grocery store 
simulates the challenge of shopping for people who
have balance disorders. Photo courtesy of the 
University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

Adrenaline junkies crave it—the thrill of zooming around curves, up and down hills, and being a tad off balance—and virtual reality games have become an easy way to simulate those sensations. Now an innovative research project is harnessing virtual reality technology, particularly its ability to challenge one’s sense of equilibrium, as a potential therapy for people with balance disorders and chronic dizziness.

With a grant from NIDCD, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) researchers have established a Medical Virtual Reality Center to study how people maintain balance and to identify potential therapies for balance problems. Their studies are advancing the understanding of balance, including components of good balance and factors that lead to poor balance.

The centerpiece of the Medical Virtual Reality Center is a virtual reality grocery store to test a new model for balance rehabilitation. A custom-built treadmill and four computer-controlled projection systems simulate grocery store aisles that range from visually simple (think white paper goods) to daunting (imagine pain relievers, vitamins, and allergy remedies). A person walking on the treadmill controls his or her own speed up the aisle and turns down the next aisle by pushing on one side of a real shopping cart adapted for the facility.

The idea is that individuals with dizziness and balance problems can lessen their symptoms over several weeks by practicing for at least an hour per week at increasingly complex tasks in the virtual grocery store, explains Susan Whitney, Ph.D., associate professor of physical therapy at the University of Pittsburgh School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences.

Clinical trials are underway, and although results are not in, researchers are optimistic. “It appears that people who are bothered by motion get better,” she says.

Dizziness Impacts Millions

Millions of Americans experience balance and dizziness problems. Good balance relies on three separate senses working harmoniously together: the inner ear, vision, and feedback from muscles and joints on body position. Problems in any one of these systems can result in a balance disorder. There are more than a dozen different diagnosable balance disorders that together affect millions of Americans at some point in their lives, most commonly in older age.

More than a quarter of people between ages 65 and 74 experienced dizziness or difficulty with balance in a 12-month period, according to data from a national public health survey.

People who have balance disorders tend to avoid situations that provoke their symptoms. Certain visual cues combined with motion and head turning can make a person feel unbalanced and dizzy or that they are falling or spinning, explains Dr. Whitney. For some, facing such situations, like a grocery store’s dizzying array of products and crowds of shoppers, can become anxiety-filled experiences.

Therapy in the virtual reality grocery store seeks to address both the physical and emotional aspects of balance disorders in a controlled environment. “What we’re doing here is physical and behavioral therapy. We expose people to gradually more complex scenes,” says Dr. Whitney.

The patients’ ability to control their own speed and discontinue the session if symptoms occur serves to lessen anxiety and fear, Dr. Whitney explains. Then practice at various assigned tasks in the virtual store helps improve their ability to balance and restore confidence. “They seem to get a lot less dizzy,” she says.

Seizing a New Opportunity: Medical Virtual Reality

The idea to use a device like a treadmill for balance rehabilitation first came up in a brainstorming session among Joseph Furman, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Division of Balance Disorders at UPMC, Mark Redfern, Ph.D., professor of bioengineering, and Dr. Whitney a couple of decades ago, she recalls. Dr. Furman asked her what piece of equipment might be most helpful. She replied that patients might benefit from practice on an airport-style moving walkway. Installing such a device was impractical though, until virtual reality came along.

UPMC received NIDCD funding for the Medical Virtual Reality Center in 2001. About a dozen UPMC researchers collaborate on a variety of studies at the center, which accommodates experiments beyond the virtual grocery store. The researchers chose to create a virtual reality grocery store since so many of the people they treat for balance disorders find grocery shopping to be challenging and anxiety-provoking.

Careful attention went into designing the projection system, which casts images of a supermarket floor and product-filled shelves to the front and sides of the treadmill. In addition, the custom treadmill is wider than most to accommodate people who may not be able to walk in a straight line. The treadmill is regularly moved out of the virtual reality space to allow for studies that have participants stand in place.

Art Institute of Pittsburgh students Jacob Galito and Anton Kozlov, working under the direction of Patrick Sparto, Ph.D., associate professor of physical therapy, have helped give the virtual grocery store a realistic appearance. Mr. Kozlov is currently working to add avatars—computer generated shoppers—and obstacles, such as boxes and displays, that one might encounter on an actual shopping trip.

The aisles in the virtual store become progressively more challenging as a person successfully navigates from one to the next. In balance therapy sessions, people try to locate a product beginning with easy tasks such as finding paper towels in the paper goods aisle. They work their way towards more complex, visually challenging tasks such as finding a small, colorful spice jar amid scores of baking ingredients.

The facility is unique in the United States, and Dr. Whitney knows of only one other virtual grocery store for balance rehabilitation in the world—at the University of Haifa in Israel.

Research

To help assess the effectiveness of virtual reality therapy, Dr. Whitney is currently conducting a clinical trial with people who experience dizziness and balance problems. The participants are randomly assigned to one of two groups for six weeks of treatment. One group will work on increasingly difficult tasks in the virtual grocery store for at least one hour per week. The other group will perform traditional balance therapy exercises designed to improve strength, posture, gait, and other components of balance, as well as to avoid falls. To avoid bias in the results, the pre- and post-treatment testing is conducted by a physical therapist who does not know, or is “blinded” to, the type of treatment the participants received.

Earlier research tested the safety of virtual reality balance therapy on healthy volunteers. Dr. Whitney and other UPMC researchers have gathered extensive data on how people respond to the virtual reality grocery store. They have observed people with and without balance disorders standing in or walking in the store’s aisles. They have also studied the responses of various age groups from children to older adults. They have tracked the speed of eye and head movements and distance traveled as people try to locate a product. These measurements help create a picture of the range of responses in people with good and poor balance.

If clinical trials show promising results, Dr. Whitney says, the next step would be to work on developing a plug-and-play version of the virtual reality grocery store for practical use in a physical therapy clinic or at home. Since setting up a costly treadmill and projection system would be beyond the means of clinics, Dr. Whitney envisions a head-mounted visor system, similar to commercial gaming systems, to recreate the virtual grocery store experience.

The device could keep track of an individual’s progress, she says. People using the system at home, under a therapist’s guidance, could also be motivated by higher scores as they improve. “The idea is that if it’s more fun, people work harder. The chance of having compliance and overcoming anxiety is better.”

Visit the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s(link is external) virtual grocery store.

***This is an article from www.nidcd.nih.gov. Direct link is https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/newsletter/2008/spring/research-balance-therapy-goes-virtual