Sidebar: Putting Parkinson's in its Place

Small actions often taken for granted in everyday life have made all the difference for Jim Ross, a patient at NYIT’s Adele Smithers Parkinson’s Disease Treatment Center in Old Westbury, N.Y. “I think if we had not heard about the center then Jim would not be walking and talking today,” says his wife, Theresa.

At the center, doctors, nurses, scientists, and therapists provide patient care for the physical, mental, and emotional aspects of the illness. Established in 1997, the center treats 250 people annually and is the first on Long Island dedicated to Parkinson’s disease research and treatment.

Research is under way at the center’s biomechanics lab to better understand Parkinson’s disease, including the design of a motorized walker, testing of a horizontally-oscillating Exer-Rest Bed, and a cycling study. In the past eight years, faculty members at the center have published more than 10 experimental studies.

Parkinson’s disease develops when dopamine-producing nerve cells in the brain are destroyed, resulting in the loss of muscle function. And though there is no cure, medical technology coupled with specialty doctors can offer treatment to help offset the effects.

The center’s services include physical, occupational, speech, and psychological therapies as well as osteopathic manipulation, a wellness program for group exercise, and genetics counseling. Programs are designed to provide educational and emotional support as much to patients with Parkinson’s disease as to their caregivers and families.

NYIT’s biomechanics lab is equipped with the same motion capture technology used to produce films such as Avatar and Pirates of the Caribbean. Patients wearing reflective markers are filmed by infrared cameras at various angles to capture subjects walking or cycling. Their movement is transmitted from camera to computer, and the Vicon Motus motion capture system connects the sensor dots of the human body into a stick-figure outline, also collecting data about angles of movement, speed, and the size of a step.

A grant from the National Institutes of Health has enabled Ely Rabin, assistant professor of neuroscience and histology, to research how tactile and visual cues and other sensory feedback affect the movement of patients. One of the lab’s newest machines, the Balance Master, is designed to pinpoint balance deficits. A patient stands on a force plate inside a three-walled booth. A computer screen mounted onto a rainbow mural is straight ahead. As the force plate moves, the machine gathers the patient’s balance responses to varied visual and ground stimuli.

The walker combines the best features of a car, a computer, and the human mind. The project has also merged NYIT’s cross-disciplinary strengths—physical therapists and NYCOM neuroscientists such as Rabin bring their health care knowledge and sensitivity to patient needs, and faculty and students from the School of Engineering and Computing Sciences have collaborated on designing the walker’s sensor network system.

Its design is based on an Axon II microcontroller, a GPS-like operating system used in robots. The system’s nerves are infrared sensors detecting objects ahead of or on the sides of the walker.

When Michael Tautonico (D.P.T. ’12, pictured above), opted to do an internship at the center, the experience launched an interest in helping people with neurological disorders.

“Prior to this internship, I had the impression the elder population was frail,” Tautonico says. “Most of my patients were elderly with neurological deficits and decreased balance, but they had more determination and willpower than many people my age. I was always amazed at how they surpassed what was expected of them.”

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