Postdoctoral fellow: Dr. Babak Taati, Department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy, University of Toronto
Lead faculty member: Dr. Alex Mihailidis, Department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy, University of Toronto
Each year, about 50,000 Canadians suffer from a stroke and 75% of them are left with a post-stroke disability or impairment. The economic costs of strokes are $3.6 billion a year. Our proposal involves developing an advanced rehabilitation device that helps post-stroke patients regain their mobility. Such patients often suffer from partial paralysis due to brain tissue damage during the stroke. While the physical brain damage could somewhat recover over time, the mobility problems often persist as a “learned paralysis” that settles during recovery.
Abnormal heart rhythms, or cardiac arrhythmias, can result in significant physical impairment and can lead to an increased risk for serious medical problems such as stroke or even sudden death. This team uses mathematics to further the understanding of cardiac arrhythmias and to develop new methods to predict which patients are at risk for arrhythmias and methods for their control. In the past year systems were developed to analyze changes in the electrical properties of heart tissue.
