![](https://crypto4nerd.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/1jxVxxhWFv8sbKT5jZJrrpw.jpeg)
NeurAlbertaTech University of Lethbridge Chapter has just won “Runner-up Prototype” for their submission to the MindFuel Tech Futures Challenge. MindFuel is a Canadian based charity which invests into local innovation, bringing together entrepreneurs, researchers, and teachers to bring ideas to life.
Intro:
This project was spawned during hackED 2023, back in January. Not so dissimilar to our own natHACKS, hackED had prizes available for students from a wide range of backgrounds and coming from a life science (neuroscience) focus, they thought it would be a good chance to pick-up a few new tricks. Particularly, in this case, applying their knowledge to create an open-source pose-estimation website which captures and analyzes key behavioral deficits in athletes with traumatic brain injury.
Problem:
Traumatic brain injuries (TBI) are injuries occurring when an external force, such as a blow to the head, causes damage to the brain, with concussions being the most common (relatively mild) type of traumatic brain injury. As Canadians with such an identity rooted in the sport of hockey, athlete health has come under intense scrutiny in recent years. Hockey has the third highest rate of concussions across high school sports, with 7.69 incidents (concussions) per 10,000 athlete exposures (plays). Learning to navigate TBI incidents with efficient, low barrier diagnosis and treatment is a pertinent topic to be examined.
The Name:
The ‘Open’ in ‘Open RehAIb’ stands for their encouragement to foster new collaborative, transparent, and community-driven innovation by making our software available to all users (open source). The ‘RehAIb’ combines the words of rehabilitation and artificial intelligence, which depicts the way in which they seek to implement this open-sourced machine learning software into providing a quantifiable and automated solution to rehabilitation in collaboration with healthcare professionals. This project is an example of local innovation addressing shared, global challenges.
Solution:
Open RehAIb’s goal is to offer an AI powered solution using the team’s neuroscience background with pose estimation to facilitate traumatic brain injury diagnosis and rehabilitation. The camera-based pose estimation fills the role of an on-site athletic physician that most teams (especially youth teams) would be lacking. Through consultation of professional athletes, coaches & teams, the best use case for this technology would be to take baseline levels of performance before injury is observed, when compared to injury-impaired performance, could contribute to the eventual diagnosis. Open RehAIb plans to make live-time calculations of musculoskeletal changes to frame (up to 50 people can have their frames calculated in a non-resource intensive process by open-pose), enabling physicians to assume a remote and precise form of medicine. Through extracting insights from motion and detecting the severity of blows to the head in conjunction with any changes in athlete performance, Open RehAIb relays this information to users and medical professionals to alert them of potential injury whilst providing a more comprehensive understanding of the incident. A key aspect of the project is to be AI enabling, without taking away the job of the human.