Biomed engineering professor receives American Heart Association grant to study robot-aided stroke rehabilitation. About every 40 seconds, someone in the United States has a stroke.

Many stroke survivors have lingering brain damage that makes motor tasks, such as grasping objects, difficult. Everyone heals at a different pace, and ideally, treatment would be patient-specific and patient-adaptive.

At the University of Delaware, Fabrizio Sergi is developing methods to assess brain activity in response to a changing set of rehabilitation exercises. Armed with these results, medical professionals could develop customized rehabilitation to give patients exactly what their healing brain cells need.

Sergi, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering, was recently awarded an American Heart Association Scientist Development Grant for this project. He will receive $230,000 for this three-year grant.

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