Stroke Rehabilitation
Project Overview & Goals
Stroke is a leading cause of adult disability and has no cure. It often results in substantial motor and sensory deficits that lead to lifelong disability and gait impairments. Clinically-practiced stroke rehabilitation and assessment focus nearly exclusively on motor abilities despite the clinical relevance of sensory impairment, and they often fail to capture important or illuminating aspects of patient gait progression. Many of the metrics used clinically to assess patient recovery are qualitative and subjective. Currently, our focus is on recovery of lower-extremity walking function.
To inform strategies for post-stroke recovery of walking function, we propose to determine the roles of impaired sensory function in single-joint motor control and correlate our findings with standard clinical measures and objective gait parameters collected continuously with a novel wearable device. This project requires an integrated approach that will ultimately better characterize motor and sensory deficits and determine the underlying sensory modalities that impact functional outcome.
Experimental Studies (in progress)
- Effects of sensory deficit on single-joint motor control
- Augmentation of clinical metrics through wearable devices
This research is in collaboration with SCAN, the Stroke Collaborative Action Network, which aims to generate scientific solutions for stroke.