SLO LIFE Magazine Dec/Jan 20/21

started. It was just a side project for me, and I worked with an advisor at
Cal Poly, and a Master’s student at the time, while we built this product
for Jack. I had absolutely no intention of starting the company at that
point. It was really just a project for me to be able to use my engineering
skills so that I could help somebody improve their quality of life.
Freezing of gait? Yes, it’s called freezing of gait. It’s one of the most
common symptoms of Parkinson’s, but also one of the most debilitating.
It’s medically defined as a sudden onset of immobility, but Jack will
explain it as feeling like his feet are glued to the floor, stuck in a box of
cement. So, all of a sudden, no matter how hard he tries, he can’t pick
up his foot, even take one step. And the reason that this happens is that
there’s a disconnect between the brain and the body that makes it so that
when your brain is sending a signal to initiate movement, that signal
just doesn’t get to the motor neurons that are activating your muscles. So
somewhere in the pathway, where the signal is being sent from your brain
to start walking, that signal gets lost and it doesn’t get to motor neurons
that activate your legs to actually initiate the walking. So, you’re frozen in
place, basically.
And how long had Jack been dealing with this problem? A long time,
something like fifteen or twenty years. But he had been using these visual
and auditory cues with his physical therapist and it helped him a lot,
tremendously. Having these cues helped him overcome freezing of gait
and actually walk. But it occurred to him that there had to be a way to
make these visual and auditory cues portable, so he came to us with an
idea. It wasn’t just, “Hey, I have this problem. Can you help me?” He came
to us with, “This is my idea of a solution, can you help me build it?” So,
that’s what we did. We [built a device and] loaded it with all his favorite
songs on it. I’ll never forget the day we had him test it. I had been working
on this thing for three months but had never really seen how effective it
could be. It was remarkable to see him go from not being able to walk, not
being able to pick up his foot, to all of a sudden being able to activate this
device and be able to walk across his living room floor. I had never seen
him do that before.
How exactly did it work? That’s what I wanted to know, too, so I started
to look into the research behind why these visual and auditory cues are
effective. I didn’t really believe that a green laser line and a metronome
was going to make that much of a difference for him. But as I dove
into the research, I found over fifty peer reviewed articles showing the
efficacy of these exact visual and auditory cues that had been published
already, so I began to understand why this works. Essentially, there’s a very
specific neural pathway that’s been damaged by the disease, or somehow
disconnected, that causes freezing of gait. If you can change the neural
pathway that’s being activated in order to initiate that walking, then you >>
36 | SLO LIFE MAGAZINE | DEC/JAN 2021