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PhD
Helping healthcare professionals “get the feel” of their work
Healthcare professionals rely on years of training to do their jobs. But in some areas of medicine, they are also guided by something else―a highly-developed sense of touch, says Toronto Rehab Scientist Dr. Heather Carnahan, whose research focus is haptics―the revolutionary new science of touch.
“I’m interested in how touch helps us control our movements,” she explains. “We move in a visual environment, but picking up an object demands the sense of touch. Touch tells us how slippery the object is, how heavy, how cold―and how much force we should generate to pick it up.”
This fascinating line of research has very real and immediate applications. Dr. Carnahan takes the principles of motor control and learning that come from her studies and uses them to develop sophisticated teaching tools for healthcare professionals in both medicine and rehabilitation.
Take, for example, a surgical resident learning to perform laparoscopic surgery –a form of minimally invasive surgery done through a small incision, using special instruments and a camera which allows the surgeon to “see” inside the patient. Dr. Carnahan has found that, using laparoscopic instruments, surgeons can feel textures, sense friction, and make decisions based on what they feel. “We are working to understand exactly what tactile information the surgeon needs so we can facilitate the design of a simulator which duplicates the experience of laparoscopic surgery,” she explains.
Until recently, health professionals like surgeons have learned technical skills through the apprenticeship model, which involves experts teaching students. Now, many institutions are using simulators to facilitate the learning process. These simulators increasingly use touch as well as sight to teach technical clinical skills.
In rehabilitation, the use of simulations to train health professionals is just catching on, says Dr. Carnahan. With her understanding of the interplay between sensory information and motor control, Dr. Carnahan is helping students get the feel of their work through the use of simulation.
For instance, she and her colleagues are developing a sophisticated model of a hand to help train therapists to make splints and orthoses. The hand is designed so that students can get the ‘feel’ of a hand with, for example, arthritis.
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Quick Biography
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Dr. Heather Carnahan is a Scientist at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute as well as a Professor in the Department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy and the Department of Surgery at the University of Toronto. An expert in haptics, the emerging science of touch, Dr. Carnahan studies how touch helps control movement. She uses her findings about the principles of motor control and learning to develop sophisticated teaching tools for healthcare professionals in medicine and rehabilitation. Dr. Carnahan received her PhD from University of Waterloo in 1989 and completed an NSERC postdoctoral fellowship in Psychology at the University of Western Ontario.
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Traditionally, therapists learn by practicing on each other. But when they first see a patient with arthritis, it can be disconcerting, says Dr. Carnahan. “The patient’s hands are not at all like the hands the student has been practicing on,” she says. “Giving them models representing things they may encounter in the clinic prepares them better to deal with actual patients.”
The model hand may ultimately be mass-produced as a teaching tool. “Before we do that, however, we have to demonstrate that using the model hand to teach is more effective than the traditional approach,” Dr. Carnahan cautions.
Although her primary focus is on training health professionals, Dr. Carnahan is also involved in research into haptic simulators for people undergoing rehabilitation after stroke, and for those with Alzheimer’s. “It’s the same principle,” she says. “We’re using touch to help people learn functional skills.”
For example, many stroke survivors lose fingertip coordination. Dr. Carnahan and colleagues are trying to retrain them to coordinate their finger movements—by retraining their sense of touch. “We use a simulator to replicate the sensation of picking up a weight,” she says. “This is a new approach, because stroke retraining has often been based on visually-driven tasks.”
Dr. Carnahan is also studying a touch-based system designed to help Alzheimer’s patients find their way around more easily. The researchers want to see if the guidance system—which involves “vibro-tactile simulators” worn on a belt that is hooked up to a GPS —actually helps these people better navigate their environments.
As well, Dr. Carnahan is involved in a project aimed at easy-to-use hearing aids for older people and those with mobility issues such as arthritis. A consultant for the German Space Program (DLR), she is also studying the impact of weightlessness, stress and cumbersome space suits on people’s ability to perform delicate tasks—such as medical procedures—in space.
Curriculum Vitae
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