Regina Sloutsky awarded NPC Collaborative Project Award for exoWALK
Thanks to funding from the NPC Collaborative Project Award, Regina Sloutsky, research physical therapist and second year Rehabilitation Sciences PhD student, will continue work with NPC Faculty on the project “exoWALK: EXOsuit-assisted Walking Automaticity and Locomotion Kinetics.” 
exoWALK is a lightweight wearable robotic exosuit designed to assist stroke patients in walking. After having a stroke, many people have difficulty walking due to damage to the neural networks that regulate unconscious walking. Typical adult walking is typically unconscious and highly automatic, relying primarily on the subcortical regions of the brain and the spinal cord. When a stroke damages these pathways, adults have to use their prefrontal cortex, or “thinking” part of the brain, in order to walk.
This reduction in “walk automaticity” leads to visible gait compensations, such as an asymmetrical, slow, or effortful gait. In order to help alleviate these walking difficulties, NPC faculty and Regina Sloutsky have developed exoWALK. The exoWALK suit reduces difficulty walking, balances gait asymmetry and helps them to walk faster. Furthermore, patients with post-stroke hemiparesis, or a weakening of the muscles on one side of the body, report that the exoWALK suit allows them to walk with greater ease.
The NPC Collaborative Project Award will go towards funding further research on the exoWALK suit. Namely, the team plans to directly quantify how much the exoWALK suit improves the gait of post-stroke patients by using portable functional neuroimaging (functional near-infrared spectroscopy–fNIRS).
To read more about Regina’s award and plans for research and see research from other NPC fellows, check out our NPC Fellows page here.