Main focus
My current work focuses on the effects of stroke on the proprioceptive sense. Proprioception is our bodies awareness of its location in space during both movement (kinesthesia) and when no movement is occurring (position sense). Stroke is a neurological injury caused either by a blockage of blood flow in a blood vessel (ischemic) or by the bursting of a blood vessel (hemorrhagic). Stroke is a leading cause of disability in America and can lead to various impairments that manifest in very heterogeneous ways. This is what makes the study of impacts of stroke so fascinating and equally frustrating.
Out of all the effects an injury to the neurological system can take (movement, cognition, speech, etc.), my focus is on the impairments to movement. It may seem paradoxical, but my work focuses on how the impairment of a sense effects movement. Senses are not only important for movement, but I would argue they are critical for movement. In fact, we know that without senses, movement does not work well. Think about how well you could move around in the dark. In fact, when you are in a dark environment, your brain is mainly relying on its proprioceptive sensors to know where you are and therefore where to go. While removal of visual inputs is a great example of our reliance on proprioception, we rely on proprioception a lot more than just at night. According to the most widely accepted theory of movement (optimal feedback control), our motor output (the actual movement we can see) is influenced mainly by proprioception. This all comes from the idea that you need to know where you are to know where to go. You may be wondering how you have made it this far without ever thinking about any of this. That is because all of this happens on an incredibly fast time scale and under subconscious control. Our brains are truly the most incredible combination of carbon (suck it chemists).
While I would love to take on the full problem of movement impairments post-stroke, I will only be alive for so long. Therefore, my focus is specifically on proprioceptive assessments. I do these proprioceptive assessments with a robotic exoskeleton. Some may be wondering, “Why the overkill with the robot when we have clinical measures that can assess proprioception?”. In short, clinical measures of proprioception have a hard time assessing proprioception due to their inherent subjectivity, floor, and ceiling effects, etc. I have designed five robotic tasks to either assess proprioception or train it. Currently, only two are currently in working order and ready for real live human test subjects. As my time progress, I will continuously update these pages and hopefully add more content.
Assistive role
I have had assistive roles on many projects ranging from creating an algorithm to generate a random maze to classification of sensory data for pre-ambulatory children with cerebral palsy.
Maze generation
- This project was done in collaboration with Makenna Dixon, who was an undergraduate researcher in the lab.
Sensors-Quantifying Active vs. Sedentary Time During Floor Play in Pre-Ambulatory Children with Cerebral Palsy
- This project was done by Julie Orlando and her colleagues. I simply helped with code review and optimization.
Determining if block order matters
- This task was done by Julia Gray under my guidance. The goal was to determine if the order of blocks during a proprioceptive robotic task mattered for our main outcome parameter.