High school student using robotics to research stroke rehabilitation
Posted Aug 11, 2014 1:01 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
A Calgary high school senior is wrapping up a summer research project that could help make a big different in the lives of stroke patients.
Tingting Yan has been working alongside researchers with Alberta Innovates Health Solutions and the Foothills Hospital on a robotics project that is hoped will speed up rehabilitation.
The robotics measure the use of vibrations in the upper arm, to fight the loss of limb awareness many stroke sufferers experience.
“Something simple like even grabbing a fork, or something to eat, they reach out their arm, and then their arm is sending signals to their brain that is in a completely different position than it actually is,” said Yan.
“We found that there is a difference between vibrations on and vibrations off and this is interesting, because we could hopefully use this in the future on stroke patients seeing as up to 50 per cent have pro-perceptive deficits.”
The Sir Winston Churchill High School student said she applied to the program after seeing a poster at school that advertised it as the ‘Best Summer Job in the World’.
She said spending the sunny days of summer in a fulfilling bio-medical research project sure beats getting a regular high school summer job.
