SLO LIFE Magazine Dec/Jan 20/21

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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
Audio/Video . Lighting . Shading . Automation . Surveillance 1320 Van Beurden Drive . Suite 102 . Los Osos (866) 633-7000 . www.coastalhomeworks.com DEC/JAN 2021 | SLO LIFE MAGAZINE | 37
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