Back in early December 2016, a team of students from the University of Delaware visited MossRehab to test out a portable wheelchair racer trainer. The lightweight trainer is designed to be portable, and is ultimately destined to provide a training aid for Ghana's first paralympic wheelchair racing club, the Go Get Dem team.

Madeline DiPasquale, PhD, is a clinical neuropsychologist with the Drucker Brain Injury Center at MossRehab, on the campus of Einstein Medical Center Philadelphia (EMCP).

Members of Lower Merion High School’s DAWGMA robotics team design, program and build robotics to compete in elaborate games, the goal of which is to inspire creativity in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). But where might that interest in technology lead?

One place is the field of rehabilitation technology. To that end, members of the team visited MossRehab this week to see how some of that technology works, learning from some of the best in the business—and also to gain insights into “disability etiquette.” The latter is particularly useful, as the team works at Judith Creed Homes for Adult Independence, Inc. (JCHAI), a community group consisting of adult persons with disabilities.

Bob Bellini, PE, is DAWGMA’s chief mentor and a computer systems architect at Lockheed Martin. Bellini accompanied the group on the MossRehab tour.

Research by Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute and Penn Medicine into a treatment for the phantom limb pain received coverage on a Philadelphia television station recently.

A team of students from the University of Delaware is designing a portable wheelchair racer trainer. Where better to test it but at MossRehab, with a veteran member of the MossRehab-sponsored Global Abilities racing team?

The visit was designed to help the students refine their design for the project, which will continue into next semester. After the team tweaks the trainer based on this week’s visit, it will come back to MossRehab and Global Abilities for further testing at that time. Wesley Chay, MD, Clinical Director, Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilition Inpatient Unit, and Naomi Greenberg, Physical Therapy Team Leader, were on hand to watch the test and offer insights on improving the design. 

The goal is to help advance the popularity and accessibility of wheelchair racing as a sport. Testing enabled the U.D. students to gauge the trainer’s speed, stability and resistance.

Atlantic City Police Officer Josh Vadell, who was shot in the head responding to a robbery Sept. 3, 2016, was discharged yesterday from the Drucker Brain Injury Center at MossRehab to a hero's welcome.

Police officers from Atlantic City Police Department, Philadelphia Police Department, and other local municipalities greeted Officer Vadell and his family to escort them home with motorcycles, cars, and sirens.

Learn more about MossRehab's traumatic brain injury services.

They might be in a wheelchair or a power chair. Maybe they walk with a cane.

It’s not that it doesn’t matter, but for the two hours they devote each week to yoga at MossRehab, people with multiple sclerosis (MS) can focus not on their limitations, but their potential. And they have greater potential than they might have realized, says Sherri Bittner, who leads what is called oMS Yoga, both at MossRehab’s main campus in Elkins Park, Pa. and MossRehab in Doylestown, Pa.

MossRehab is proud to sponsor adaptive surfer (and longtime friend from "They Will Surf Again") Heather Markham as she begins competing on the adaptive surfing tour circuit!

Take a look at Heather competing in the AccesSurf competition that took place in Hawaii in August, a picture of her new MossRehab-branded helmet and the MossRehab sticker that is going on her brand new custom surfboard when it's finished.

A garden can be a place of beauty and contentment for anyone who visits.

The Alice and Herbert Sachs Therapeutic Conservatory and Garden at MossRehab is one such place—but it's so much more. The Conservatory and Garden is dedicated to helping patients who are recovering from stroke, traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury and other conditions add a new and powerful dimension to their rehabilitation.

Named in honor of the project's benefactors, the Conservatory and Garden helps patients advance their rehabilitation through gardening activities in a bright and airy greenhouse. The Conservatory features three distinct work, grow and show areas, as well as an outdoor patio.

Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, who struggled all her life with the aftereffects of physical trauma—childhood polio and  a near-fatal bus accident that shattered her pelvis and broke her spinal column—once wrote, “I’ve done my paintings well. . . and they have a message of pain in them.”

Pain is not quite as in evidence in the works of noted Philadelphia painter and printmaker Gerard “Jerry” Di Falco, except in the quartet of assemblages on wood he calls, “Pain.” The painted and gilded animal skulls and bones—and a seed pod resembling a twisted spine—hang in the ninth floor Cherry Street apartment in Philadelphia that he shares with partner of 26 years, Ron Funk.

Di Falco, whose work is displayed in dozens of museums and private collections around the world, has been in almost constant pain for the past 35 years, the result of degenerative disk disease, including multiple herniations, scoliosis, and stenosis. He also has reflex sympathetic dystrophy syndrome (RSDS), sometimes called complex regional pain syndrome, a rare disorder in which the nervous system sends punishing nerve impulses to parts of the body, often the extremities, causing burning pain, touch and temperature sensitivity and muscle weakness.