Researching how stroke affects sense of touch

So the ability to feel is really important for everything we do in our lives. And so for example, if you think about even a simple cup, if I want to pick up my cup, I need to not only be able to generate that movement, I also need to feel exactly what I'm doing. And after a stroke, what can happen is you lose that sensation. So what we wanted to do was provide stimuli and actually visualize; see how those move along the nervous system and through the brain and track that. So that once we understand why we know how to actually think about how to fix it. So a lot of individuals with stroke will have a closed-fist posture. And so that looks something a little bit like this. A lot of tactile stimulation devices or really anything that interacts with somebody's hand who has stroke will often require them to flatten their hand. So one of our big goals is to create something with such a small profile that we can fit it within that person's natural closed hand posture. What this project does is allow us to bring together an engineering mechanics student as well as a neuroscience student, both in doctoral programs. They are also learning how to do introduced planetary work and collaborate together on a team to do something meaningful for the field of science and engineering. When I become familiar with Netta's research, it was something new to me and my background was computer engineering. I worked in control and automation engineering and I always had a passion for like medicine and like something relevant to health. So I really like to see that what we are building. I'm using my skills to build something that could help people. And it helps me to understand what we need to build what we need to do. And I learned a lot. So right now, we don't understand why people after stroke have loss of sensation. And so what we hope to be able to do is better understand what causes these deficits so that we can contribute to their fuller lives of being able to once again feel and stay in touch with the world around them.