Stroke, the leading cause of disability for adults, has a high cost in inpatient care and rehabilitation. To reduce the cost and ultimately improve stroke care outcomes, follow-up data is required to correlate successful versus unsuccessful recovery to determine optimal interventions.
This data is not currently available due to difficulties involved in data acquisition resulting in the lack of centralized databanks once patients are released from acute care hospitals.
A research project titled “mStroke: Mobile Technology for Post-Stroke Recurrence Prevention and Recovery” is evaluating the recovery of post-stroke patients after they leave the hospital. This research is being undertaken at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, College of Engineering and Computer Science www.utc.edu/college-engineering-computer-science.
The university received research grant award (R15EB015700) for $384,747 from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) www.nibib.nih.gov. The researchers are developing a smart system to monitor and evaluate motor control, fall risk, and gait speed of patients post stroke using wearable Bluetooth low-energy devices.
The smart system provides providers and therapists treating patients post stroke with information to help them better understand the magnitude of movement dysfunction, to help them improve acute rehabilitation once a patient is discharged and provide objective movement and activity health information.
Physicians and therapists will have access to previously unavailable real-time data, be able to support efficient and effective management strategies, and extend care at the end of rehabilitation when therapy is discontinued.
Go to https://wwwcf.nlm.nih.gov/hsr_project/home_proj.cfm for more information, or email Mina Sartipi at mina-sartipi@utc.edu or call (423) 425-2256.