 My name is Colin, and I want to tell you a story. It's a story about a dream that came true with subtitles. My story started in floating 17 years ago, and when I thought about 17 and I heard Ash Khan this morning give his little poem, I realized I should have written Haiku for this morning. That's a poem with 17 syllables, but I didn't. The Haiku that comes to mind when I think about Ash Khan as a butterfly, may not be the image you all have, but it suits the Haiku that comes to mind, corn down between the rows weaving them together a butterfly goes. That's a little Haiku. Now, 17 years ago we started making float tanks in England, and we made all sorts of shapes and sizes. We made pod type float tanks, we made round ones, we made square ones or rectangular ones, and we made specials for people who wanted something a little bit different. But then the story that I really want to tell you today began three years ago, almost exactly to the day because it was at the conference in Portland. We come from England, but our floating home is here in Portland, and at Portland three years ago I met Dr. Justin Feinstein for the first time, and Justin had a dream, and we met and he said to me, Colin, I have a dream. I want to use floatation for research. I think the float tanks should be round, I think there should be an open one and there should be a closed one, and there should be all sorts of special features that I haven't even thought about yet. Could you do that for me? And I said, yes. And that is how we began for the float tanks at Liber. And Justin's dream began to look like this. It's a facility in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Oklahoma is a great place for it to be because Dr. Jay Shirley it was in Oklahoma City, who actually was the first scientist to start using floatation to examine what happens in our minds. And here at the Liber Center you see we have a quite a big facility with a reception room, an open round float pool for introduction, a central area for all the researchers to actually sit and do whatever they do, and a closed float tank, around one eight foot diameter for some of the experiments. And that dream came true. We had to up our act as float tank manufacturers because Justin wanted the float experience to be as near perfect as he could achieve. So we had to have tighter calibration of the variables than we would normally expect to do. And in particular we had to look at the air, which I think Jim mentioned. In the early days we only worried about float tank solution, the water, the epsom salt, but of course the air that you're breathing is absolutely essential part of the experience of relaxation and the invisibility of the experience that you become unaware of your environment. Obviously we had to look after the water. So it's controlled but like all floatation systems it has to be accurately controlled. We added water with an accurate level system to about one millimeter using reverse osmosis filtration. We have sterilization or I should say disinfection is the correct word by UV and hydrogen peroxide. We have the epsom salt and we maintain the specific gravity at around 1.26, which is ideal for floating. But what's more important is to concentrate on the air. The air temperature should be as close as possible to the water temperature. And controlling it as has been said before is actually more difficult than controlling the water temperature, especially since you want to achieve a relative humidity of 80%. That's the right target. If you have a humidity higher than 80%, you will tend to make it stuffy and you'll get condensation, which is a problem we don't want to have. And if the humidity drops much below 80%, when you're floating the salt begins to crystallize around your body and you start to feel it. So 80% and at the same temperature the water is quite difficult to achieve. So in the open pool it's done by air conditioning system and in the closed pool we have a progressive system. And this is part of the dream diagram that has become reality. At the top of the diagram you see there's a tube where we actually extract air with a fan a long way away. And the air that goes in starts in the green box which is a HEPA filter taking away particles and then we humidify the air with basically a steam box which is under individual control of course and then the black box is we call it the hot box. It heats the air and the whole thing is controlled so that we put into that big round float tank air at the right temperature just the same or slightly higher. It's amazing when you feel a breeze coming in the air feels colder so you we actually have the temperature sometimes a little higher. And so that's the length we had to go to which we wouldn't normally do on a commercial system but it's possibly the way that we should go. And we added a data logging system which runs through the internet so these graphs that you can see here these this is a 24-hour record as it happens they're continuous we can look at these from anywhere in the world and in particular Justin can stay up all night looking at them to see what's going on. And I'm not going to explain every detail because that's not the point. The point is that we can see what's going on in this in this graph you see here the peaks are caused by actually that there's a probe on the actual heater the heater gets much hotter than the rest of the system of course. The green line is the pump as a matter of fact the pump is regularly going through the day you can in this case you see there wasn't much of a float session going on the pump was running intermittently and it rises but the steady lines at the bottom are showing that the air and the water are pretty much at the same temperature and the bottom of the pro of that graph is the humidity and the humidity I don't know if you can see the values but that's hanging around 80 all the time. In the open pool we have a slightly different set of variables and you can see here that's where the where the peaks come in that's where the heater turns on that will be the door opening so the the room cools down a little bit the heaters have to compensate there's a huge gain of course because where you see the blue arrow the temperature of the air and the temperature of the water are the same more or less and they're running through absolutely steady and the point about doing this data logging which is again a very feature for the future is that we can check all kinds of parameters and we learned a lot from watching what happens over the long term. Now noise reduction we have three courses of noise airborne noise is obvious ground-born noise is what comes through the floor and there's heater and ticking noise. Now what we did we found that the hospital has an MRI machine it's not a noisy building normally speaking but an MRI machine is very noisy and when you are floating you could hear it so we had to put the float tanks on springs this is a diagram showing a float tank mounted on the heater which continues heating of course and then mounted on rubber springs and this is what happens this is a a video running with a float tank loaded to the right mass mounted on exactly the kind of springs and here we see we're exciting it with a little motorized drill and we're using an iPad one of these very useful with an app called vibrations and that helps see what that experiment just showed the left hand one is mounted on the floor being excited by a rather gross vibration and that's what happens when you're at the float tank when it's mounted on springs. The ticking there's a bit of a rumor going around that if you have a fiberglass tank and you put heaters underneath it then you're doomed to have ticking and there's obviously truth in the rumor but you don't have to have it we experienced some ticking when everything was really quiet and we dealt with it and it doesn't tick it's a question of putting the right technology in place so that is the way that Justin's dream of a research facility using floatation came true and after the break you will hear Justin himself explaining what he did what we did as technologists was produce a float tank system that could be used for clinical research that we can monitor all the variables using an internet connected data logger and that you can control things like the lights by waving at them a little detail it may just be a gimmick but we were quite pleased with it um my time is up that's the end of my story we made a dream come true and I hope our technology can make all your dreams come true and floating can expand all over the world