New Book for National Stroke Awareness Month from Survivor

Stroke Survivor Jeff Kagan Is Available to Discuss Stroke Recovery and His New Book "Life After Stroke, On The Road To Recovery"

ATLANTA, April 14, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Jeff Kagan had a stroke in 2004. He is a stroke survivor. He has been through the long recovery process and he wants to help you understand what to expect. He wants to help you prepare for the changes to come in your life, good and bad, and also prepare for recovery.
He learned so much about recovery by living through it, and he wants to help others understand what is coming next and that recovery will happen for them. There are also things to watch out for.
Whether you are a stroke survivor, caretaker, family or friend, there are questions you need answered. The same questions Kagan asked his doctors and counselors, but didn't get answered. He searched bookstores and online and could not find the answers.
So he decided when he recovered he would write a book and help other stroke survivors and their family and friends understand and make it through these confusing times.
After seven years of recovery, Jeff Kagan just wrote and published "Life After Stroke, On The Road To Recovery." Visit http://jeffkagan.com/Life_After_Stroke.htm to read some of the book for free.
The book is available for sale at the publisher's website, http://www.fastpencil.com/publications/1341-Life-After-Stroke, or BarnesAndNoble.com, Amazon.com and other online bookstores.
Every stroke recovery is different, but the important thing to remember is everyone recovers to one extent or another. Jeff Kagan believes to get the best recovery you have to have the right mind set and attitude. You have to work hard for it, but recovery will happen if you do. He will discuss this important point among many others.
A stroke is not your fault. There are many young and fit stroke survivors. Recovery may not entirely be up to you, but Kagan believes your hard work and attitude can make the difference between a long and weak or a quicker and stronger recovery.
Jeff Kagan has appeared on Fox News, CNBC, CNN, PBS, ABC, NBC and CBS as well as dozens of other radio and television stations, newspapers and magazines, and on the Web.
He is available to discuss stroke recovery and National Stroke Awareness Month with the media.  more read...

Building the Brain: Exhibit Interactive Prototypes

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Brain-Injured Individuals Learning to Embrace Life

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Brain-Injured Individuals Learning to Embrace Life

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Acquired brain injury adults learn live with their handicaps with the help of Coastline's ABI Program.

By Claire Chang | Email the author | March 22, 2011

It is a battle to live with an acquired brain injury, but a group of determined adults at Coastline Community College are not letting their handicaps get in the way of living life to its fullest.
Coastline’s Acquired Brain Injury Program has brought together students from around the country to California as they train with their designated succinct teams in hopes of restoring and minimizing any difficulties they have been experiencing since their injuries, said ABI Program coordinator Celeste Ryan.
Rigoberto Saenz clearly remembered what a good student he used to be before serving in Iraq with the U.S. Army. But after surviving several improvised explosive devices in 2006, Saenz became a different person.
“At first, I didn’t really notice anything change, but my wife started to notice that I was forgetting a lot” he said. “I was getting bad headaches and because I couldn’t remember things, I started to get angry.”
The program takes on a strong focus on emotional adjustment to brain injury, Ryan said. The limitations brain injured individuals recognize often lead them to frustration and depression and further pulls them into a life of alienation from friends and family, she added.
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Acquired brain injury adults learn live with their handicaps with the help of Coastline's ABI Program.

By Claire Chang | Email the author | March 22, 2011

It is a battle to live with an acquired brain injury, but a group of determined adults at Coastline Community College are not letting their handicaps get in the way of living life to its fullest.
Coastline’s Acquired Brain Injury Program has brought together students from around the country to California as they train with their designated succinct teams in hopes of restoring and minimizing any difficulties they have been experiencing since their injuries, said ABI Program coordinator Celeste Ryan.
Rigoberto Saenz clearly remembered what a good student he used to be before serving in Iraq with the U.S. Army. But after surviving several improvised explosive devices in 2006, Saenz became a different person.
“At first, I didn’t really notice anything change, but my wife started to notice that I was forgetting a lot” he said. “I was getting bad headaches and because I couldn’t remember things, I started to get angry.”
The program takes on a strong focus on emotional adjustment to brain injury, Ryan said. The limitations brain injured individuals recognize often lead them to frustration and depression and further pulls them into a life of alienation from friends and family, she added.
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Paralyzed Woman's Neural Implant Still Firing After 1,000 Days

Greg Tito | 25 Mar 2011 4:00 pm

Filed under: greg tito, bionics, bioshock, braingate, brown university, deus ex, neural implant

The implant allows the woman to accurately move a cursor on a computer by just thinking about it.
In 2005, researchers from Brown University in Providence, RI placed a silicon electrode array in the brain of a 50-year-old woman who had been paralyzed - unable to move or speak - since she suffered a stroke in the mid-1990s. The array, about the size of a baby aspirin pill, was able to read electric signals in her brain and allow her to pinpoint a cursor on a computer screen by imagining the movement of her hand. The implant worked well, but the scientists purposefully left the implant in the head of the patient referred to as S3 to test how long a device would last inside a human body. A paper released this week reported that, 1,000 days after the implant was installed, it still functioned relatively well, hopefully proving that long-term neural implants are no longer science-fiction. The question is: where can I get one?
"This proof of concept - that after 1,000 days a woman who has no functional use of her limbs and is unable to speak can reliably control a cursor on a computer screen using only the intended movement of her hand - is an important step for the field," said Dr. Leigh Hochberg, the director of the BrainGate project.
BrainGate is a combination of the hardware of the implant and the software that translates the electrical pulses of the brain to movement on a screen. The tests that S3 underwent were meant to approximate clicking on an application's menu bar, with some targets as small as an icon on your desktop.
"Our objective with the neural interface is to reach the level of performance of a person without a disability using a mouse," said John Simeral, another researcher on the team and the author of the paper.
The team admitted that not every neuron fired as well as it did when it was first installed, but the clinical trial at least proved that more permanent implants were possible. All of the problems were from mechanical or engineering design flaws, and could be corrected with further refinements. The tests being reported on now were actually conducted in 2008, and a full clinical trial is currently being organized by Dr. Leigh Hochberg and her team. We may eventually see these implants as an option for people who have no options.
The BrainGate project is amazing, not only because it shows that many of the gameplay elements we take for granted, say in Deus Ex or BioShock, could actually happen, but because of what it means for humanity. Synthetic body implants are usually considered for cosmetic reasons or to create a "super-soldier" from an already capable human being, but this BrainGate implant allows disabled people a human experience on par with the rest of us.
With this implant, Stephen Hawking would be able to play Myst - at least easier than he could now. And that's just awesome.
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