Each year, an estimated 50,000 Canadians experience a stroke and for those patients, recovery often involves intense physical therapy. However, Maritime researchers Shaun Boe and Tim Bardouille are trying to change the way survivors get better.

During a stroke, blood flow is cut off to a specific area of the brain, depriving it of oxygen. As a result, neurons die, making the functions controlled by that part of the brain impossible.

“So, if it happens in an area of the brain that controls your arm and hand, for example, say if it’s my right hand, it’s the left side of my brain that would be damaged,” says Boe.

“They just can’t use their arm and hand anymore and so what we need to do is, we need to get that part of the brain to recover so that the arm and hand would have some recovery as well.”

Traditional stroke rehabilitation involves repeating the same movement over and over again. This repetition rewires the brain in a sense and helps it relearn familiar activities.

Not only can this be tiring for the patient, it also requires extensive work with a therapist, putting strain on an already burdened health care system, which is where motor mental imagery can help.

“There is this idea that you can think about doing a movement and that will actually activate the same areas of your brain as if you were actually doing the movement,” says Boe.

For example, a person sits inside a specialized chamber with their head inside a scanner. They are told to either do a task or simply think about doing it. The scanner detects and measures changes in their brain’s magnetic field and the results appear right in front of them.

“So, what we do is, we record that activity,” says Boe. “Right now we do it with fancy, bigger pieces of equipment that are expensive. We capture that activity, analyze it in less than a second and then feed it back to them.”

“We show people on the screen a couple of bars that tell us about whether or not they are thinking about moving or not and the bar goes up, if you are thinking about moving your left hand, the left bar goes up,” says Bardouille. 

Based on that feedback, a patient can try to change what is happening in their own brain.

“So rather than having people do an experiment and then we look at their brain, they can actually look at their brain while they are doing the experiment,” says Bardouille.

Boe and Bardouille are partnering with a local company to develop a device that would take this technology out of the lab and into a patient’s hospital room or home.

“What we imagine in the end is that an individual can have this headset and they can imagine doing the movement if they are not able to do the movement, or if they are tired from practicing the movement, they can imagine doing the movement and they can get feedback about if they are doing it right, if they’re activating the right parts of their brain, just on a tablet or an iPhone or something like that,” says Bardouoille.

The Brain Repair Centre in Halifax recently awarded the two researchers a knowledge transition grant, which will help them further their motor mental imagery research.