"Lived experience" in neurorehabilitation

This course has been such a privilege to be able to teach. We are at the forefront of this movement where the goal is to try to incorporate lived experience into the research that we do. I was in more of an era where when we did research we were focused on how do we take our engineering skills and build devices and hand them over to people. And that made advances, however, there were limitations in how far we could get because we missed the mark many times on what really is needed. And so that's the inspiration for me with this course is how do we make something that's actually going to be meaningful. As well as throughout the entire course, incorporating the lived experience—what matters to the person who in the end is going to benefit from this. During each class, I participate as a community member who has lived experience with a brain injury. Different practitioners who help brain injury survivors through a clinic or therapy setting come to class, they speak about the topic, and then I speak about my experience with that specific topic. So, I hope that the students learn what the real world is like to navigate with a brain injury and how they can address it as engineers. The reason why we had the cooking class was to try to replicate what happens every single day in somebody's home. These individuals cannot follow a recipe, they cannot talk at the same time, they cannot multitask. And so that was unique in this cohort is individuals with brain injury experience is that so many of the impairments are invisible to you or I. So I think with this class, what I want to take is this idea of human-centered design and the way that you center the person with a disability and you make sure that they are able to advocate for themselves, their voice is centered and the things that they truly need are at the center in order to make an actual effective design or a product that will affect their lives in a positive way. What I love with this course is that we are training the next generation. These are individuals who, if they're engineers, they're policy makers, they're clinicians, wherever they go, they'll be advocates for brain injury and they will understand how to make the world a better place.