Hi Everyone,

  Just wanted to share information on one of the projects that I’m involve with here at Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center.  Its call “Preserving Community Mobility in Wheelchair Users".   I'm excited about this project because the older I get the more concern I become about finding different ways to preserve my shoulders.  I don’t have any shoulder issue at this point and I want to keep it that way.   The engineers and therapist involve in this project will get to study the mechanics of how we put our wheelchairs into our cars/trucks/van (with no ramp or lift) and the stresswe put on our shoulder(s).  They will do this by video taping and putting sensors on your upper body and wheelchair to identify where stresses and forces are carried out.

The first outcome is to provide guidelines for shoulder-preserving transfer and lifting mechanics, including identification of specific techniques (ex: hand placement, body positions and movement patterns) that are least stressful for the shoulder using the findings of the experimental data.  The second outcome will be to provide factual guidelines for designs of wheelchair frames and automobiles that are transfer –friendly and less stressful to the shoulder.


Best,

Hi everyone!  It’s been a while since my last post, but I’m here to post regularly and keep you updated. There’s so much happening where I work at Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center (Rancho) that will benefit our lives and I look forward to sharing them with you.

First, I want to share some exciting information with our community about our new project  that will assist us in improving our quality of life. The National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR) has awarded a “Spinal Cord Injury Model System (SCIMS)” grant to Rancho.  The overall objective of this grant is to generate new knowledge that will directly contribute to improving health, function, and community participation for persons with a spinal cord injury (SCI). In this research project, we will identify whether a home-based intervention that was demonstrated to be effective at reducing chronic shoulder pain in persons with SCI could be used as a preventative program to decrease the rate of shoulder pain onset.  Additionally, we will test whether a more interactive version of the prevention program would also enhance community participation and self-efficacy for exercise engagement, in addition to further lowering the rate of shoulder pain onset.

Our project has more details than what I’m describing here, but I want to keep it short as I plan to keep you all informed about what I will be working on in this project and of all the exciting things that I will be doing in the near future.