Sometimes payoff lines are slogans or catchy phrases that corporations throw around glibly but for many they’re merely words that clutter the advertising and marketing space.
Sometimes though they have a much deeper meaning especially when put in context and having seen it first hand.
In this case it’s Toyota’s “Start Your Impossible’, the theme behind the automaker’s recent Olympic and Paralympic campaign aimed at inspiring athletes and spectators alike.
Dr. Gill Pratt, Toyota’s Chief Scientist, is the man driving it and it stretches way beyond the Games in order to provide mobility for all, including those with disabilities.
It started in 2017 when he met Sudarshan Gautam, a Canadian mountain climber and actor who in 2013 became the first person to summit Mount Everest without arms and the use of prosthetics.
When he was 13 years old he was shocked by a high voltage current which resulted in him having both his arms amputated and the doctor giving him 24 hours to live.
“The reason I climb is to prove that disability is not an inability.”
Pratt says that Gautam’s journey is all our journeys.
“Carl Jung said we all have metaphors and stories that are common to all human experiences. That idea was popularised in the ‘40s by Joseph Campbell and even made it into Star wars.
“It’s called the hero's journey. It begins with a call to adventure, something happens to us but one way or another we have challenges that we have to overcome, so we make the transition from the known to the unknown,” he said speaking at Toyota House in Paris.
“Along the way a helper or helpers cross our paths and we go through trials and tribulations and we have to show that we are stronger than the challenge. We may fail but we get up and continue to try until things are as bad as they can be down at the bottom of the abyss and somehow we make it.
“There’s death, rebirth, transformation, often atonement and eventually we make it back and we turn it from the unknown to the known.”
Pratt’s own journey began when he met scientist and inventor Professor John Kanwisher who designed and built a Fluxgate magnetometer that sensed the magnetic field of the earth and acts as a compass to show north.
In 1989 Kanwisher had a friend that was blind and when he visited a city that he was not familiar with he would get lost. Kanwisher thought that if he could provide a blind person a North Star of sorts, they would at least know which way north was.
“I took that magnetometer and for my masters thesis at MIT I built a blind man’s compass. It created a sound that could be turned on and off that would emit a white noise that always came from the north. It gave me a taste of what people were going through on a hero's journey.
The second one occurred when he was a junior professor at MIT and met Hugh Herr,an American rock climber, engineer and biophysicist who had both his legs amputated below the knees after being stuck in a snowstorm.
“He said that this was not only a challenge or the abyss but also an opportunity for him to succeed and help others in their hero’s journey. He came to me and started working on all kinds of enhanced prosthetics. We worked on a smart prosthetic knee, a device for people with above knee amputations used to walk.
“Until then most of them were mechanical and passive but we worked on one of the first versions that had a little computer inside. It adapts to speed and can also recognise different scenarios that the wearer finds themselves in.
While at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which concerns itself with all things US military and technological but also happens to have veterans in their portfolio.
“Many veterans come back with a variety of medical issues including one of the most difficult issues; spinal cord injuries. One of the projects we worked on 15 years ago was an artificial arm that works on measuring signals inside the brain of the person.
“We had a volunteer that agreed to have implants in her brain and we explored different computer algorithms that would read her brain signals, interpret them and control a robotic arm depending on what she wanted it to do.”
It so happens that the body's immune system starts to cover the brain implants because it’s a foreign body and the quality of the signal deteriorates.
To counter that they developed software that works in parallel with the person and used the signal coming from her brain to try to infer what her goal was, similar to what he had done with the smart knee.
In a demonstration video when the arm assist software was on she succeeded 100 percent of the time and when it was off and she used the implants she could not succeed.
“We could of course just program the software to do the task but that would mean the person is not in control and responsible for the movement.
“This is an incredibly important principle in technologies for disabled people and the elderly. If you help too much the psychological impact of what you do makes the person feel worse than if you didn’t help at all.
“In a test we turned the help on and off at random and asked her whether she thought she did it on her own or with help from the software. And because we had the help be as minimal as possible it turns out she could not tell.
“It means we give the person a sense of agency.”
It is Toyota after all, and the same idea was transferred for the Toyota Guardian system for driver assist to avoid a crash.
“The hero’s journey is not just about us, but our role to fundamentally help other people and that’s what Toyota means when we talk about happiness for all as being the goal of the company.”
Pointing to American gymnast Simone Biles, Pratt asked whether people are moved by her story because she is the greatest gymnast on earth or if there was another reason.
“I think the reason we are so moved is because we know the hero’s journey she’s been on and it hasn’t been an easy path to be the best. We identify with our own hero’s journey and those of our friends and loved ones that are going through the same thing.
“And that’s the reason I think the Paralympics is the real olympics.”