The Rehab Lab Team at the Smart Rehab Lab

The Rehab Lab Team consists of students and professionals, each contributing their own skills to the clinic. Each brings a unique background and perspective to their practice, resulting in a comprehensive and client-centered approach to rehabilitation.

The Smart Rehab Lab has a new tool to help patients practice physical therapy at home: tele-rehabilitation. The technology is intended to bridge the gap between a patient and their physical therapist, which can be problematic for stroke survivors. It uses a combination of three ingredients: motion tracking that captures movement activity; electrical impedance tomography, or EIT, which measures what muscles are doing; and virtual reality (VR), which lets the patient see their performance alongside their therapist.

Rehab Lab Team: Your Support System for Successful Rehab

While stroke survivors may not be “digital natives,” Rikakis says, they have built-in comfort in the digital world, making them prime candidates for this type of rehabilitation. The lab’s National Institutes of Health-funded telerehabilitation project uses a fused knowledge base of human and machine learning to assess rehabilitation progress and provide feedback to the patient and summaries to their therapist.

The Rehab Lab SG students are currently training lower-level undergraduates to assist with the laboratory’s day-to-day operations, so that when they graduate, there is a pipeline of trained undergraduate researchers for the future. The CAPh Lab also took advantage of the recent national Physiology Understanding Week to bring its multi-disciplinary team to Tippin Elementary School to engage with second-graders in a series of activities to increase their basic physiological knowledge.