Tanvi Bhatt
University of Illinois Chicago, IL·Medicine & Clinical Research
Falls are a leading cause of serious injury in older adults and in people living with neurological conditions. Many falls happen after a sudden slip or trip, when the body must react quickly to recover balance.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Neuroscience
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
fall prevention
falls
reactive balance
- Grants
- 4 known grants, through Aug 2030
What they work on
- Test whether neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES), mild pulses that contract the quadriceps of the weaker leg, improves stability and limb support during 12 sessions of treadmill reactive balance training in people with moderate to severe chronic stroke.
- Examine neuromuscular and neuroplastic changes, including cortical signals and corticospinal excitability, after combined reactive balance training and NMES in highly impaired stroke survivors.
- Compare reactive stepping responses to slips and trips, with and without a simultaneous mental task, in older adults with mild cognitive impairment versus cognitively healthy older adults.
- Relate reactive balance control in older adults with mild cognitive impairment to brain structure and functional connectivity, and test a combined perturbation-based cognitive-motor training program.
- Compare 8 weeks of a low-equipment task-specific balance program with treadmill perturbation training and conventional balance training on reactive and volitional balance in at-risk older adults, in a randomized controlled trial.
- Measure 18-month retention of task-specific balance training on real-life falls and falls efficacy, and use simulation techniques to explore training-induced neuromuscular adaptations.
More about the research
Conventional balance exercises do little to train this reactive balance. This research studies how people recover from unexpected balance loss and designs training to lower fall risk. One key approach is perturbation training, in which people are repeatedly exposed to controlled slips and trips in a safe setting. The projects apply this idea to three at-risk groups: people with chronic stroke, older adults with mild cognitive impairment, and community-dwelling older adults. The lab also takes part in a center that turns behavioral research into health programs for aging adults.
Why it matters
About one in three older adults falls each year, and people with stroke fall about three times as often as healthy peers. These falls cause hip fractures, head injuries and heavy health care costs. This work could yield training programs that clinics and community facilities can actually deliver to lower fall risk: low-equipment balance training, electrical stimulation added to perturbation training for highly impaired stroke survivors, and combined cognitive-motor training for older adults with mild cognitive impairment.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Trisha Kesar
Emory University, GA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Develop a model predictive controller that uses portable ultrasound readings of muscle fatigue to automatically set functional electrical stimulation intensity for correcting footdrop in stroke survivors.
Ulf Bronas
Georgetown University, DC·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether a 6-month home-based walking program improves executive function and other areas of thinking in 116 older adults with chronic kidney disease and mild cognitive impairment, compared with an attention control group.
David Ziegler
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Psychology
Determine the minimum effective dose of MediTrain, a closed-loop digital meditation program that trains focused attention, for improving cognitive control and reducing stress in older adults, using a nationwide mobile randomized controlled trial of 3,240 participants.
The school
University of Illinois Chicago: 42 labs on PI Pages, $532M a year on research, 359 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.