The Star: July 20, 2017

The Star Latest Christchurch news at www.star.kiwi
Thursday July 20 2017 19
ews
Teen to hike barefoot
for kids with no shoes
• By Ashleigh Monk
WALKING the 78km of the
Heaphy Track is no mean feat.
But what about walking it
bare feet?
Teenager Bo Hofmans
(right) plans to do just that in
an effort to raise money for
disadvantaged children who
don’t have shoes to wear to
school.
The 15-year-old Cashmere
High School student has been
walking the gravelly Rapaki
Track to prepare for his
barefoot hike in October.
“I was thinking doing
[the walk] barefoot might
be a good idea just as an
experience, and then my mate
mentioned ‘why don’t you do
it for a charity?’”
Bo did some research and
found out KidsCan had a
“Shoes for Kids” programme
that had seen 128,000 pairs
of shoes donated to underprivileged
children who went
to school barefoot.
Bo said he would soon start
carrying a 15kg pack and rub
methylated spirits on his feet
to prepare for the Heaphy
Track.
“I’m hoping for a nice inch
of callouses,” he said.
“It would be great if I
didn’t feel anything while I’m
walking.”
Bo has set up a Givealittle
page called Barefoot for
KidsCan, and hopes to raise
about $15,000 before his hike
on October 9.
Quake, medical innovations
reward varsity researcher
A CANTERBURY researcher
has received a national innovator
award for his work, which
has been used both to protect
buildings from earthquakes
and to improve patient hip
replacements.
Dr Geoff Rodgers, a mechanical
engineer at Canterbury University,
took the Norman FB Barry
Foundation Emerging Innovator
Award at the recent KiwiNet
Research Commercialisation
Awards.
Mechanical seismic dampers
he developed to dissipate
kinetic energy of seismic waves
penetrating a building structure
are in use in a low-damage
hospital complex in Christchurch.
Dr Rodgers was also developing
a new method for early detection
of wear and tear of hip joint implants
that monitored the sound
vibrations transmitted from a patient’s
hip replacement implants.
The acoustic emission monitoring
system was a non-invasive
sensing technique that recorded
low-level vibrations emitted from
the implant during patient motion
that make it through tissue to the
skin’s surface.
By listening to the ultrasonic
INNOVATIVE: Canterbury University’s Dr Geoff Rodgers with
mechanical seismic dampers.
vibrations of the implant, it was
possible to relate them to the
condition of the implant, to help
orthopaedic surgeons predict
impending failures and manage
revision surgery.
Early detection of wear and tear
could offer opportunities for proactive
intervention, reducing the
severity of surgery and providing
improved patient outcomes.
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PRESENTED BY:
Lead awards judge Dr Andrew
Kelly, an executive director at
BioPacific Partners said the
applicants were demonstrating
how commercially savvy they
were.
“Yet again, we’re seeing the
benefit of previous research commercialisation
success stories,
and some failures, and people are
learning from those,” he said.