Technology to help monitor concussions
Doctors routinely track their patients’ hand-eye coordination to monitor any neuromuscular deficits, particularly as patients age or when they are injured — but the tests doctors have been using to track this kind of information may be subjective and qualitative. Researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), and Hebrew SeniorLife, Boston, recently completed the first clinical study of a new rapid neuroassessment device they developed to quantitatively measure neuromuscular performance, as reported in Wednesday’s online Journal of Gerontology: Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences. In the study, 150 healthy people from the Boston area aged 21 to 95 used a stylus to follow a moving target around a circle on a computer tablet. As every person performed this tracing task, proprietary computer methods developed at the Wyss Institute measured their deviations from the circular path, which the researchers then...