Innovator's Statement: Egg Carton- Harris 22yr Male T3-SCI

       I was assigned the task of trying to use a simple household item to help a client with a SCI at the T3 level. The item I was randomly assigned was a egg carton. I think the most valuable things learned from this project was to think outside the box and not to be afraid to ask for help. After reading the case study I was stumped at how to use the egg carton as an intervention with the client. I reached out to my group and my sister in law, who is an occupational therapist, for help. My sister in law guided me towards looking for how the egg carton might could help the client's balance issues in an assistive technology way. I also learned that once I have found what I am looking for to keeping looking for other ways something might could be used. I found that things can be used in multifunctional ways and this is making the most use out of the limited resources you have.  I think this assignment will help me as a future occupational therapist by allowing me to practice my OT think. This project allowed me to find a problem and come up with a solution using the materials I had available. I think this is a valuable trait for an occupational therapist to have. 

Max Little: A test for Parkinson's with a phone call - Neuro Note #5

         For the fifth and final Neurological Aspects assignment I decided I would try to learn more about Parkinson's Disease. In order to obtain this goal I watched a Ted Talk title " Max Little: A test for Parkinson's with a phone call".  I will have to admit it was the title that drew me in. The video was extremely intriguing and I would recommend taking the 10 minutes to watch the talk. It can be found on Youtube as well as Ted.com. 

      In the video Max Little, who is an applied mathematician, discusses his invention of a test for Parkinson's that can be done over the phone.  Max Little stated that there currently is not a biological test or marker to diagnose Parkinson's and how that could affect how we find a cure. How would we ever know if a cure is working or not without an objective, accurate, and consistent way to diagnosis the disease. Little wanted to find an objective way to test for Parkinson's that was cheap, easily accessible, and highly accurate. The method Max Little and his team landed on was voice detection. Max stated  some of the hallmark signs of Parkinson's ( tremors, rigidity, weakness)  and went on to explain that these are prevalent in your voice as well. Max Little and his team created a voice analysis software to look for voice tremor, voice rigidity, and voice weakness. Max Little explain that this software could be used with any digital microphone making every day phones capable of use in the tests. The software is able to look for symptoms as well as tell whether a patient who is already been diagnosed with Parkinson's is getting better or worse with stored data from previous calls. 

      I was really captivated by the idea behind the test. More research and testing is needed to be done, however this could be very beneficial for Parkinson's research in the future. If clients were able to call in regularly the software could keep track of their progression, alerting their doctor if any red flags were found. This would eliminated the need for constant visits for an expensive doctors check up and allow for more data points on the individuals. 

"Alzheimer’s Is Not Normal Aging — And We Can Cure It" Ted Talk - Neuro Note #4

     I choose to look at a neurological disease that is personally close to me for my fourth assignment in Neurological Aspects. This disease is dementia and more specifically Alzheimer's disease. This is a close topic to me because my grandmother has struggled with Alzheimer's for the past 7 years. In order to gain a better understanding of the disease, I decided to watch a Ted Talk titled "Alzheimer's Is Not Normal Aging-And We Can Cure It" by Samuel Cohen.  

    I found the video on youtube, but it is also accessible through Ted.com. I would recommend anyone in the medical field or anyone who has a loved one that is suffering from the disease watch the video. It offers a very optimistic and positive outlook on Alzheimer's. The speaker discusses briefly the history of Alzheimer's and points out the very little progress made in the past century. Cohen also stated some statistics on the prevalence and economic burden of the disease. 40 million people worldwide are diagnosed with the disease and this cost the United States alone 200 billion dollars a year in medical bills. 

      The majority of the talk was focused on the idea that Alzheimer's is a curable disease, however we are facing some different obstacles such as lack of funding, miss information, and lack of awareness. Cohen pointed out that cancer receives a much larger amount of research funding a year even though the two affect close to the same amount of people. Cohen also points out that for the longest society just assumed Alzheimer's was just normal course of aging however this is not true. Lastly Cohen pointed to the lack of awareness being brought to the disease compared to things such as heart attacks and cancer. 

      I really enjoyed the video and found it very encouraging for the future. I hope this mindset leads to serious progression in the research and hopefully a cure. However,  just like Cohen said if their is going to be cure found it will have to start with us.