Office Opening Times

Please find below our office opening hours over the Christmas and New Year holidays.

All enquires should be made during normal office hours.  Only emergency calls will be answered by our on call manager. 

Wishing you and your family a wonderful Christmas and New Year.

	OFFICE HOURS	EMERGENCY ON CALL
Monday 23rd Dec	09:00 – 17:00	0845 0945 279 or 0131 618 0777
Tuesday 24th Dec	09:00 – 17:00
Wednesday (Christmas Day)	Closed
Thursday (Boxing Day)	Closed
Friday 27th Dec	09:00 – 17:00
Saturday 28th Dec	Closed
Sunday 29th Dec	Closed

	OFFICE HOURS	EMERGENCY ON CALL
Monday 30th Dec	09:00 – 17:00	0845 0945 279 or 0131 618 0777
Tuesday 31st  Dec	09:00 – 17:00
Wednesday (New Year)	Closed
Thursday (New Year)	Closed
Friday 3rd Jan	09:00 – 17:00
Saturday 4th Jan	Closed
Sunday 5th Jan	Closed

ROBOTIC WHEELCHAIR

Two wheelchair control technology advancements have made headlines this week. One, reported on by BBC Health, involves using a tongue piercing to move your wheelchair. And the other needs little intervention from the wheelchair user at all.

It applies lessons learned from work on self-driving cars to making powered wheelchairs safer and less unwieldy for people who find accurate movements a struggle.

"Robotic Adaptation to Humans Adapting to Robots, (Radhar), was an EU-funded initiative which ran from 2010 until this September. Ian Steadman writes for New Statesman that Radhar has created a semi-autonomous system for wheelchairs.

He says that a wheelchair that drives itself without any intervention wouldn't work. "A better method is to smooth out jerky journeys, estimating where it thinks its owner wants to go and making subtle alterations to the journey route that leaves the user feeling absolutely in control, without the sensation of being ferried around."

Radhar's system uses two Kinect cameras and an onboard computer to do just that.

One camera scans the surroundings and makes a map. The computer uses this to spot obstacles and generate possible routes.

The other camera scans the wheelchair user, "assuming that the destination correlates with the direction of gaze. It also recognises if someone has a part of their body sticking out to the side, and knows to warn of the danger of hitting something as a result".