Helping Henry with Robotica
Published: Aug 30, 2007On a bright afternoon in early August, Henry Evans’ face lit up. In the bedroom of his Los Altos home, he demonstrated how — with only a slight movement of his head — he could do something he had not done for years: turn on his television.
Evans nodded his head up and down until a small laser attached to his glasses pointed at a “grey box,” or receiver, with a small computer inside that detected the laser and turned on the TV. Within a second, the sounds from one of the latest Disney Channel shows blared from the set. Evans tilted his head back, laughing so hard his wife, Jane, had to help him unhook his feet from his wheelchair.
The device, known as the “laserfinger,” has given Evans an independence that he has not had since 2002, when a stroke drastically changed the life of the then-healthy 40 year old.
The stroke did not alter his brain but left his body completely paralyzed and Evans unable to speak. Only after undergoing intensive therapy in Montana for two years was he able to perform simple tasks including sitting, clicking a mouse with his finger and moving his head.
“Your body is no longer part of ‘you’ in the normal sense, because you can’t control it,” Evans wrote in his blog, describing his life post-stroke.
Now he can turn on anything with an on/off switch, such as a fan or a light — and it is thanks to a group of Palo Alto High School students and their mentor, Chris Tacklind.
Thirty teens have been meeting for three hours a week for the past year, determined to improve Evans’ quality of life through the use of robotics. Knowing their project has an immediate beneficiary has motivated the teens, many of whom are not straight-A students.
“It’s a huge sense of accomplishment to see what a difference we are making in someone’s life,” said Daniel Shaffer, a soft-spoken, dark-haired incoming senior, one of the leaders of the group.
The laserfinger and its impact on Evans has brought national attention to the project, which is being hailed as an inspiration for teenage inventors.
Evans, meanwhile, is full of enthusiasm and excitement, whether he is using a new device or watching the teens work.
“I otherwise have no way to interact with my environment,” Evans said through a computerized device in which he clicks on words on the screen, which the machine then pronounces. “The laserfinger is a great use of their knowledge.”
Although no bigger than a rubber eraser, the device is helping Evans to take a sizable step back toward the life he nearly lost five years ago.
Aug. 29, 2002, started as a normal day. Evans woke up with a piercing headache, but he refused to let it prevent him from going to work and taking his four kids to school.
With his children in the car, he drove from their house on Page Mill Road, a mile and a half from Skyline Boulevard, down the winding road. But his children began to notice Evans was not acting like his normal self. As he drove, they noticed Evans’ speech slurring, and the eldest son, Stephen, then in eighth grade, later told his mother, Jane, that he was scared his father might drive off the road.
Evans dropped the kids off safely and drove the curvy six miles back home. He told Jane all he wanted to do was sleep, but she insisted he go to the doctor. Evans felt so dizzy he could barely walk. He broke down crying, saying he could not walk to the car, even though only three months earlier he had had a physical, and his doctor told him he was completely healthy.
After only an hour at the emergency room, he could no longer move his right arm. Doctors thought he had meningitis. Soon after, Evans went into a week-long coma and stayed in intensive care for 22 days.
Doctors told Jane he would not survive…
