Grant: Research Tools and Instruments

<p>The expected rapid increase in Canada&rsquo;s population of seniors in the next 20 years has been identified in several Canadian studies as a significant problem facing the Canadian healthcare system. Many of these age-related disorders such as post-stroke disabilities, Parkinson&rsquo;s disease (PD), and Essential Tremor (ET) reflect sensorimotor integration (SMI) disorders. This results in impaired mobility in seniors and directly affects their health-related quality of life. A possible approach to address these sensorimotor dysfunctions is through the development and implementation of novel cost effective technologies and techniques targeted at specific preventative, diagnostic and therapeutic issues. It is known that organized, supervised and repetitive sensorimotor (physical, perceptual) exercises can substantially decrease the occurrence rate of adverse events associated with sensorimotor dysfunctions and in some cases accelerate recovery rates. <br /> The main goal of our research is to design, implement, evaluate and commercialize technologies and techniques that can be used in-home or in a community-based resource centre (&ldquo;in-centre&rdquo;) to (a) quantify the ability of seniors with regard to perception, and actuation (sensorimotor performance assessment) during their daily lives; (b) deliver interactive goal-oriented perceptual and kinesthetic in-home rehabilitation to seniors; and (c) provide supervised home-to-hospital communication with seniors for longitudinal recording of health history, state of any sensorimotor dysfunctions and/or changes. The research is aimed at developing and validating techniques that build on recent developments in (a) neurology and neuroscience, where significant work has been done on understanding the mechanisms underlying sensorimotor control and dysfunction in humans; and (b) haptics, robotics, and teleoperation, where significant theoretical work and practical applications have been reported on the concept of multimodality uni/bi-lateral interactions. <br /> An important hypothesis that is being investigated in our research is that optimality and state of SMI in diseases such as PD as well as in aging can be modelled and assessed by systematically studying and manipulating multimodal inputs including haptics, vision, sound, position, touch, stiffness, and proprioception. This requires a system that is approved for clinical use and is sufficiently open with regard to software and hardware design to enable modification of the system in a variety of ways as needed for the tasks. The equipment that we wish to acquire (the KINARM system) meets these requirements and is very well suited for multimodal SMI studies and analyses of the effects on SMI of diseases and aging.</p>