December 24, 2018 – Beyond Rehab

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Anchor lead: Engineering may help older adults simply live better, Elizabeth Tracey reports

A bioengineering approach to rehabilitation may soon help older folks who’ve experienced events like falls return to their previous level of functioning faster and better, but may also provide a host of assessments and interventions to help in daily life. That’s according to Gregory Hager, director of the Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare at Johns Hopkins.

Hager: The acute needs really drive technology because the need is so obvious and the way to fill it is in some ways obvious but I expect that will spread then and become much more a model where we go from acute needs to really starting to think of healthcare as wellness care. We’re going to build better and better models for what is your current health state. What we want to do is to ultimately vector your health state into the best possible state that you can be in, so that you’re able to live at home, function independently and extend both life and quality of life in that environment. :31

Hager says such ideas were discussed at the recent Engineering for and Aging Society symposium in Baltimore. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.