Disability rights and robotics: Co-producing futures

This project brought together a team of 25 co-researchers from the University of the West of England, Fairfield Farm College and Wiltshire Centre of Independent Living. The co-researchers are a diverse group including disabled people, carers, students, and academics from social work, psychology and sociology to robotics. Our research team demonstrates a wealth of experiences as some members had both lived experience of disability, in addition to being involved in teaching, learning and research. The research question for the project was:How can robotic technologies support disability rights? Rights are about everyday opportunities to live life to the full, human rights that everyone is entitled to (The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) 2009 (Enable.un.org, 2019). In this time of rapid social change to our social and work lives, relationships and leisure, there are new technologies that might support disability rights like ‘driverless cars’, smart phones, social media and new robotic technologies. The project had two aims:•to identify priority research questions into disability rights and robotics•to develop the co-production process for future researc

Residual perceptual distortion in 'recovered' hemispatial neglect

In most neglect patients, line bisection errors become smaller on repeated tests over the months following the lesion. We have tried to determine in two typical patients whether this is because of a real reduction in the perceptual distortions that appear to underlie line bisection errors in neglect, or whether it reflects a learned behavioural strategy to counteract those perceptual biases. We tested the patients on two occasions (2 and 12 months post-stroke), on line bisection and also on the 'Landmark' task. The data indicated that at the first testing session both patients showed strong 'perceptual' neglect, making large rightward errors in the standard bisection task and uniformly leftward pointing in the Landmark task. On the second occasion, as expected, both patients showed a marked recovery when tested with the line bisection task, making only very small errors. In contrast, their landmark performance was still markedly biased in the same direction as before. These findings suggest that despite their apparent recovery on the bisection task, both patients still experience some form of perceptual distortion of horizontal lines. It is suggested that the Landmark task may provide a sensitive means for identifying real recovery of the underlying perceptual deficit

Dispersant Effects in the Selective Reaction of Aryl Diazonium Salts with Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes in Aqueous Solution

Current methods of synthesis for carbon nanotubes (CNTs) usually produce heterogeneous mixtures of different nanotube diameters and thus a mixture of electronic properties. Consequently, many techniques to sort nanotubes according to their electronic type have been devised. One such method involves the chemical reaction of CNTs with aryl diazonium salts. Here we examine the reactions of electric arc produced CNTs (dispersed by a variety of surfactants and polymers in aqueous solution) with 4-bromo-, 4-nitro-, and 4-carboxybenzenediazonium tetrafluoroborate salts in order to find conditions for maximum selectivity. Reactions were monitored through the semiconducting S₂₂ and metallic M₁₁ transitions in the UV–vis–NIR absorbance spectra of the nanotube dispersions. Selectivity was observed to depend heavily on the type of surfactant, the type of diazonium salt and its concentration, the reaction temperature, and the solution pH. Additionally, the surfactant concentration was found to exert a significant influence as the dediazoniation product yields are affected by this parameter. For certain combinations of surfactant and diazonium salt the selectivity is markedly improved, particularly in dispersions of nonionic surfactants Pluronic F-127 and Brij S-100, which are similar in structure. Smaller diameter HiPCO nanotubes were better functionalized in dispersions of Triton X-405. The greater selectivity afforded by these poly(ethylene oxide) containing polymers is postulated to arise from electron donation provided by their ether oxygens. The ionic surfactant sodium dodecyl sulfate was found to display unique behavior in that semiconducting nanotubes were preferentially functionalized at natural pH, likely due charge localization interactions with the surfactant