Natalie Burkhard

Stroke is the main cause of adult disability, and impairments are often both sensory and motor. When these affect the lower extremity, gait impairments result. One of the greatest challenges facing post-stroke gait therapy is poor clinical assessment of and unfounded treatments for these impairments, despite the relevance of sensory function to motor control and, specifically, ankle proprioception to gait. We hypothesized that augmenting the sensory information stroke survivors receive will improve functional outcomes and simplify identification of motor issues.

I designed and conducted experiments in healthy subjects and chronic stroke subjects to demonstrate whether a sensory intervention had the potential to augment ankle proprioception during an isolated, controlled task in either population. Ultimately, the intervention was unsuccessful, but provided a learning opportunity for programming in C/C++, data acquisition with a PCI card (Sensoray 826), circuit design and implementation (driving tactors, reading accelerometers, etc.), human experiment design and iteration, system integration, repeated measures analysis, and interdisciplinary collaboration with the SCAN research team.