Just met with Dr. Sandra Rosen at SFSU. She was very interested and excited about our WiiCane work. She’s familiar with Guth, and her own work has focused on similar concerns. Her background is O&M and PT.
Sandy's work has looked at gait and posture (both set in place by early teen years) and their influences on veering behavior. Sandy proposed that we could do a joint project. Evaluate gait and posture before treatment, train with the WiiCane system, then re-evaluate gait and posture of individuals whose veering has diminished.. The evals are brief (~30 minutes, I believe she said). We could see if gait is actually altered by the traveler to achieve straight-line travel. Imagine – we could make a significant contribution to understand what cause and how to ameliorate veering. This would be great research!
Thoughts?
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4 comments:
"Joint project" Ha! Get it?
That's a really good idea, Gene. We need to identify other researchers whose work overlaps as collaborators. I was at a conference in SF a couple of weeks ago that Sandy was at, but we didn't meet. I am friends with her colleague Bill Krandall at Smith-Kettlewell in SF. Bill speaks very highly of her expertise and wisdom. I think we should ask Sandy to design an experiment focusing on the relationship of posture and gait with WiiCane training. She could develop the protocol in partnership with Annette, and then Sandy can carry out the analysis and be a co-author. She could also provide some commentary in the curriculum dealing with this topic, although I guess that would only make sense if it turns out that there is measurable changes in posture and gait associated with WiiCane training. I would rather do it this way than try to make another project out of it, because we need these findings now if we are planning to introduce the product this year, which we appear to be on track to doing.
Sounds interesting. Just clarifying for myself, do you envision the WiiCane system measuring gait and/or posture for these experiments? Or does Sandy observe and record gait and posture herself?
Sandy, or a licensed PT would need to do the assessment. They have standard procedures apparently. We need to blind it in some way, with some of the initial assessments on folks who do not go through treatment with the WiiCane system, and others that do. Should be straight forward.
I actually think this is something for us (or maybe just Sandy and I) to consider after development is done.
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