My name is Tanya Kari, I'm a Proud Paralympian I competed in cross-country
skiing for Finland.
I'm currently leading the adaptive sports and recreation program
at the University of Utah. There are individuals with super high level
injuries who need technology in their everyday life and that means that
they're gonna need in their sports too.
For the past thirty years there really
hasn't been anything out there that allows someone of the disability level
that we're targeting to ski independently.
We realised very early on
that there's only certain amount of adaptive equipment available and that
equipment is typically available to those who are the most abled.
It's really a total dream I've been thinking about this for a lot of years and the
technology finally caught up so a lot of the folks that were injured were injured
doing some sports related type of activity and so to bring a sport back to
them at this level when they didn't think they could do it has really been
an amazing experience for the whole team.
The Tetra ski is kind of an electrified
version of the Tessier snow cart.
We are tapping into the population that really
doesn't have even much arm function left or none.
The snow cart is a manually
controlled device. We just thought that you know we could enhance it by
different electrical and software controls that would make it a truly
independent device for the more complex disabilities.
Manual cart ski you still
need your biceps and wrist extensors to be able to operate it. We figured out
that what if you don't have that function what are you gonna do then so
now if you have function in your mouth you can be in charge of what the ski
does. Here we have the sip and puff system. It's basically an air tube that's
connected to the powered actuator so they live down here, they control each
ski independently, they are capable of about five hundred pounds of force per
ski so you know any kind of train we're going through they are more than capable
of driving the skis and as you give it a sip or a puff,
you'll translate the skis left or right accordingly. For individuals with higher
injury levels the field has been pretty narrow it's been few things but
more like someone is actually doing the sport for them and they are enjoying the
ride. The TetraSki changes all that by allowing people to control their own
turns, control the line that they ski down the mountain themselves and allow
someone a nearly complete independent skiing experience.
The joystick unit lives here and its core functionality it's just left to go left and right to
go right. As someone gets more experienced we can unlock more
capabilities of the joystick and allow them to control wedging so they can
basically control their amount of speed based on varying terrain.
The instructor has a remote control that they can use to override this gear at any time.
If someone's not skiing properly we can kind of step, in show them how proper
turns are made using this wirelessly and then allow them to replicate that on
snow themselves. We do operate it tethered and the tether is designed to
be a pure emergency break the tether doesn't affect the way the ski skis at
all and we want to stress that this is an independent experience but if we do
need to slam on the brakes we can slam on the brakes and stop very quickly if
we need to. The people with the higher disabilities can't do a lot of sport.
When you have equipment like this, you can be active,
you can be like others and I think it's great.
The technology that we have on the ski can pretty much do anything the
participant wants it to do. A lot of the people we bring out have never been
skiing before, never been in the mountains and would never be able to
experience that otherwise and so it's really cool especially for me as a skier
myself to make people aware that, yes this does exist and yes you can ski
independently. We are happy when we see individual with disabilities doing something.
I think that the ultimate goal could be to be in the Paralympic programme
with this development.