Developing interactive systems for home-based stroke rehabilitation.

I'm Ashlyn Keller. Her I'm an Associate Professor in Computer Science with an appointment also an art here at Virginia Tech. I co lead the interactive neuro rehabilitation lap. And here we work on the capture and assessment of human movement. We've been working on stroke rehabilitation systems for almost 10 years, starting with building very large scale, very accurate systems that were in the hospital, moving towards the clinic. And now the focus of our work here is really looking towards home-based care. One of the things we're trying to do is how could we develop low-cost system for the home that would solve a couple of things that motivate the patient can get the patient accurate feedback. And is it useful either in conjunction with traditional therapy in the clinic or even as a standalone as this is the sole type of therapy that you build. If we have a very small footprint of a setup, the idea of be like this could be something you set up in your kitchen table, just a two camera setup, and then using a tablet interface to deliver the therapy protocol. We've custom-designed a bunch of objects as well that we hope can better approximate the types of activities of everyday living that are very important for people who have suffered something like a stroke. So are you able to feed yourself and dress yourself, can use basic hygiene and are able to kinda like move around and do things as well. What we do in here is we have unimpaired subjects come here to take us through into kind of stress test the system and begin to see for people who are unimpaired, how might they move in the space? Um, how might we begin to understand the signatures of those movements? There's a window of neuroplasticity after a stroke when you would expect a person to make the fastest gains. And we sort of have this optimal window where we're going to try and jump in and get as much mass practice to try and get as much functional improvement as we can. But what we're learning more and more is that the brain is flipping amazing and we have the potential to improve for years and years on out. I know stroke survivors who are still making improvements 89 years after their initial incident. Stroke is so prevalent in the United States through there just aren't enough of us to cover it. So if we can take therapy to someone's home, then their opportunities to actually participate and engage with, with their own therapeutic process really increases. I think all of us are really excited about the time when this actually gets to be put into people's homes. And the goal is never to replace the therapist book. Be able to see them, increase their ability to serve the people that they currently work with and diagnose issues and patients and help them know specifically when, allow them to recover quickest or in the best way possible. Really, really excited. But when we finally get to see that happen.