Tutor System Important Tool in Post TBI Therapy

Zak Koeske writing in the Fairlawn Patch on October 9, 2011 reported about TBI survivor Jane Concato who discusses her own experience dealing with brain injury.
Early one morning about seven years ago, Jane Concato rose out of bed in her Westwood home and headed downstairs.
One false step during her descent changed her life forever.
“I fell down the steps,” said Concato, whose husband, Joe, heard the fall and came running to see what had happened.
Joe found his wife unconscious, squeezed up against the front door.
“He called 911 and then it just all began,” Jane said. “My life with a brain injury.”
Concato’s fall fractured her skull, bruising both her right and left temporal lobes. She remained in a coma at Hackensack Hospital for three excruciating weeks.
The doctors there prepared Concato’s husband for the worst.
“Joe would tell me that when I was in Hackensack Hospital, the neuropsychologist would say, ‘This might be it. She’ll survive, but she might never walk, she might never speak.’”
After coming out of her coma, Concato endured more than six months of cognitive remediation at the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in East Orange.
Her major cognitive deficits involved speech – both speaking and processing the speech of others – and problem solving. She also was suffering from depression, a common problem for individuals diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury because of the sudden and profound life change it brings about.
“One minute you’re,” Concato paused. “You’re just so different.”
Like many people, Concato didn’t know much about traumatic brain injury, or TBI, before her fall.
In the last seven years, awareness of the condition has grown — due in large part to the highly publicized TBI epidemic among returning war veterans and football players – even still, few know that the annual incidence of TBI is higher than that of breast cancer, multiple sclerosis, spinal cord injury and HIV/AIDS combined.
According to the Brain Injury Association of New Jersey, a TBI advocacy group, 12,000 to 15,000 of the 1.4 million people who suffer traumatic brain injuries annually are from New Jersey. BIANJ estimates that 175,000 New Jersey residents currently live with disabilities that resulted from traumatic brain injuries.
During recovery for TBI patients are heavily involved in physiotherapy. One of the newest methods to enable them to improve functional outcomes in their rehabilitation is through the use of the Tutor system.
The Tutor system, consisting of the HandTutor, ArmTutor, LegTutor and 3DTutor, has been developed to allow for functional rehabilitation of the whole body including the upper and lower extremity. The system consists of ergonomic wearable devices and dedicated rehabilitation software that provide patient instructions and feedback to encourage intensive massed controlled exercise practice. The Tutor system allows for controlled exercise of multijoints within the normal movement pattern which prevents the development of undesired and compensatory joint movement and ensures better performance of functional tasks. Additional features of the Tutor system include quantitative evaluation, objective follow up and tele-rehabilitation.
The new medical devices are available for children as well as adults and through the use of telerehabilitation and are FDA and CE certified.