The need for effective and accessible rehabilitation services is increasing, especially as the population of the U.S. continues to age. Technology-assisted rehabilitation in the clinic and the home, known as Smart Rehab, is the emerging solution for improving health and wellness.
Smart Rehab provides evidence-based, customized therapy in diverse contexts to produce better functional outcomes quickly. Smart Rehab can adopt and customize rapidly advancing technologies, leading to decreased development costs and increased availability to the public, especially in underserved areas.
To widely implement Smart Rehab, there are still significant technical, behavioral, and clinical challenges to address.
The Smart Rehab Lab aims to address this array of challenges and advance effective rehabilitation in the home. The Lab functions as a diverse umbrella collaborative bringing together relevant institutional expertise from the Virginia Tech College of Engineering, the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC, and Carilion Clinic.
Participating units at Virginia Tech include the Assistive Robotics Lab, the Interactive Neurorehabilitation Lab, the Kevin P. Granata Biomechanics Lab, and the Wireless@VT research group, while from Carilion Clinic, participating units include Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Home Based Care, Neurology, and Orthopaedics. Virginia Tech is a national leader in smart infrastructure and ubiquitous mobility, and works in partnership with Carilion Clinic, the leading health care provider in southwestern Virginia. The Smart Rehab Lab builds upon the distributed, participatory health care model employed by Carilion Clinic, to improve well-being and health outcomes in a wide geographic area, including many underserved regions