Evaluating the impact of a national geriatric mental health ECHO educational program on healthcare providers' practice.

Project Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes (ECHO) enables healthcare providers to share knowledge and best practices via telementoring. The ECHO model builds provider capacity and improves care for patients with a variety of health conditions. This study describes a Canada-wide National ECHO pilot project in the area of geriatric mental health and reports on the program's impact on providers' care practices.

Concussion can increase the risk of visually induced motion sickness.

Concussion can lead to various symptoms such as balance problems, memory impairments, dizziness, and/or headaches. It has been previously suggested that during self-motion relevant tasks, individuals with concussion may rely heavily on visual information to compensate for potentially less reliable vestibular inputs and/or problems with multisensory integration. As such, concussed individuals may also be more sensitive to other visually-driven sensations such as visually induced motion sickness (VIMS).

Sabotage Detection Using DL Models on EEG Data From a Cognitive-Motor Integration Task.

Objective clinical tools, including cognitive-motor integration (CMI) tasks, have the potential to improve concussion rehabilitation by helping to determine whether or not a concussion has occurred. In order to be useful, however, an individual must put forth their best effort. In this study, we have proposed a novel method to detect the difference in cortical activity between best effort (no-sabotage) and willful under-performance (sabotage) using a deep learning (DL) approach on the electroencephalogram (EEG) signals.

Virtual reality hope machines in a curative imaginary: recommendations for neurorehabilitation research from a critical disability studies perspective.

Purpose: This paper provides recommendations for neurorehabilitative research informed by insights from critical disability studies (CDS) and a research study that tested an augmented neurorehabilitative technology prototype.

Methods: The methodology combines critical reflection, feminist science studies and CDS to analyze how neurorehabilitation and disability studies conceptualize notions of disability and cure. It offers recommendations for reconciling the conflicting ideologies of cure that operate within neurorehabilitative research.

Long-term effects of concussion on relevancy-based modulation of somatosensory-evoked potentials.

Objective: The purpose of this investigation was to better understand the effects of concussions on the ability to selectively up or down-regulate incoming somatosensory information based on relevance.

Methods: Median nerve somatosensory-evoked potentials (SEPs) were elicited from electrical stimulation and recorded from scalp electrodes while participants completed tasks that altered the relevance of specific somatosensory information being conveyed along the stimulated nerve.

Results: Within the control group, SEP amplitudes for task-relevant somatosensory information were significantly greater than for non-relevant somatosensory information at the earliest cortical processing potentials (N20-P27).

The Effects of Mild Traumatic Brain Injury on Cognitive-Motor Integration for Skilled Performance.

Adults exposed to blast and blunt impact often experience mild traumatic brain injury, affecting neural functions related to sensory, cognitive, and motor function. In this perspective article, we will review the effects of impact and blast exposure on functional performance that requires the integration of these sensory, cognitive, and motor control systems. We describe cognitive-motor integration and how it relates to successfully navigating skilled activities crucial for work, duty, sport, and even daily life.

A History of Concussion Affects Relevancy-Based Modulation of Cortical Responses to Tactile Stimuli.

Modulating cortical excitability based on a stimulus' relevance to the task at hand is a component of sensory gating, and serves to protect higher cortical centers from being overwhelmed with irrelevant information (McIlroy et al., 2003; Kumar et al., 2005; Wasaka et al.

The contribution of the prefrontal cortex to relevancy-based gating of visual and tactile stimuli.

Patients with lesions of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) show increased distractibility and impairments in inhibiting cortical responses to irrelevant stimuli. This study was designed to test the role of the PFC in the early modality-specific modulation of event-related potentials (ERPs) generated during a sensory selection task. The task required participants to make a scaled motor response to the amplitudes of visual and tactile stimuli presented individually or concurrently.

Simultaneity and Temporal Order Judgments Are Coded Differently and Change With Age: An Event-Related Potential Study.

Multisensory integration is required for a number of daily living tasks where the inability to accurately identify simultaneity and temporality of multisensory events results in errors in judgment leading to poor decision-making and dangerous behavior. Previously, our lab discovered that older adults exhibited impaired timing of audiovisual events, particularly when making temporal order judgments (TOJs). Simultaneity judgments (SJs), however, were preserved across the lifespan.

Gating at early cortical processing stages is associated with changes in behavioural performance on a sensory conflict task.

While there is evidence to show early enhancement of modality-specific somatosensory cortical event-related potentials (ERP) when two stimuli are task-relevant, less is understood about the cortical and behavioural correlates of early modality-specific sensory gating. This study sought to understand how attentional gating affects cortical processing of visual and tactile stimuli at early stages of modality-specific representation. Specifically, alterations in early somatosensory and visual processing based on attentional relevance were examined, along with the effect of an unattended sensory stimulus on cortical processing and behavioural performance.

Early modality-specific somatosensory cortical regions are modulated by attended visual stimuli: interaction of vision, touch and behavioral intent.

Bimodal interactions between relevant visual and tactile inputs can facilitate attentional modulation at early stages in somatosensory cortices to achieve goal-oriented behaviors. However, the specific contribution of each sensory system during attentional processing and, importantly, how these interact with the required behavioral motor goals remains unclear. Here we used electroencephalography and event-related potentials (ERPs) to test the hypothesis that activity from modality-specific somatosensory cortical regions would be enhanced with task-relevant bimodal (visual-tactile) stimuli and that the degree of modulation would depend on the difficulty of the associated sensory-motor task demands.