Game Based Stroke Rehabilitation - Walt Scacchi
Channel: UCIBrenICS
Date: 22/05/2017

Walt Scacchi
Senior Research Scientist
Department Donald Bren School of Information and Computer 

Friday, May 19, 2017

"Game-Based Stroke Telerehabilitation: Challenges in Scaling to National Clinical Trials"

Abstract: Worldwide, stroke is the second leading cause of death, and third leading cause of disability, giving rise to about 800K stroke survivors per year in the U.S., and upwards of 15M globally. First year, out-patient clinical care for these survivors costs $20K. Survivors on average live about six years post stroke. Approximately 55% of stroke survivors endure persistent, impairments, such as upper extremity hemiparesis. Most survivors experience limited out-patient therapeutic care that is often tedious, unfulfilling and lack playfulness. Ultimately, sustained stroke rehabilitation care must be done for survivors who live at home with their chronic care conditions. In this talk, I examine the question of how best to utilize computer games and networked information technology to deliver personalized stroke rehabilitation therapy and ongoing assessment to patient limitations and recovered abilities at home? In particular, exploring such question must consider how to design and conduct randomized clinical trials that continually assess the efficacy of game-based stroke telerehabilitation at home compared to best practices within clinical care settings, across diverse socio-economic communities found in the U.S. Examples of the system design, games, data analytics infrastructure, and multi-media conferencing between stroke survivors at home and their clinically based therapists/case managers, will be presented, as will socio-technical conditions, constraints and future reconfigurations. This project is directed by Dr. Steve Cramer, Neural Repair Lab, Gross Stem Cell Research Instittute, School of Medicine, in conjunction with the NINDS funded network of stroke research hospitals and clinics known as StrokeNet.

Bio: Walt Scacchi is senior research scientist and research faculty member in the Institute for Software Research, and also Director of Research at the Institute for Virtual Environments and Computer Games, both at University of California, Irvine. He received a Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science at UC Irvine in 1981. From 1981-1998, he was a professor at the University of Southern California. Dr. Scacchi returned to UC Irvine in 1999. His research interests include open source software development, computer game culture and technology, virtual worlds for modeling and simulating complex socio-technical processes, software acquisition, and secure open architecture systems. Dr. Scacchi is an active researcher with more than 200 research publications, and has directed more than 65 externally funded research projects. He has given more than 200 invited presentations world-wide, including 17 keynote addresses and 7 tutorials. He also has had numerous consulting and visiting scientist positions with more than 40 firms or institutes, including five start-up ventures. He served as General Co-Chair for the 8 th. Intern. Conference on Open Source Systems in 2012, Co-Chair of the 3 rd Games and Software Engineering Workshop at the 2013 Intern. Conf. On Software Engineering, and ICS Distinguished Alumnus of 2012.