While working toward his medical residency in Boston, Albert Kwon ’08 started a mental list of things he wanted to improve in the medical system.
“I took note of many problems in medicine that I thought technology could potentially solve,” says Kwon, who just completed training in general pediatrics and general anesthesia at both Boston Children’s and Brigham and Women’s hospitals and will be starting an interventional pain medicine fellowship at Stanford in January 2019. But when he thought about which of all the things on his list had the greatest potential for impact, one stood out: developing technology to help treat patients with brain trauma.
Kwon cofounded AUGMENTx, a health-care technology company that uses augmented reality to deliver neurological exercises for patients recovering from stroke, chronic pain, limb loss, and surgeries that require rehabilitation therapy. Often, patients who require neurological rehab have only a short stay in a rehab facility. Once they are sent home, where they don’t have access to the resources and staff to help facilitate exercises and measure improvement, their recovery diminishes. But by using augmented reality, AUGMENTx can provide a more interactive and effective means of engaging and continuing an effective rehab program. For example, mirror box therapy, which creates a visual illusion of a paralyzed, missing, or painful limb moving normally by mirroring the movements of the normal side, is often very effective but not readily available. AUGMENTx can re-create the exercise through its augmented-reality headset.
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