Invest in Graduate Students for a Healthier Canada Rehabilitation medicine graduate students conduct research and acquire clinical skills to improve quality of life for those living with disability, injury or disease. Help train the researchers and clinicians our society needs.
Grad student Gabriela Constantinescu presents on her swallowing therapy app.
The expertise, research and innovations generated by rehabilitation medicine graduate students support active, healthy lifestyles and foster independence for our aging population. Donor-supported scholarships remove financial barriers, facilitating students’ quests for knowledge to improve quality of life for those living with disability, injury or disease.
Thinking Outside of the Clinic
The Need for Innovative Solutions
“The PhD program has helped me become a better critical thinker. It has made me feel more confident to advocate for our patients and fight for changes to how we provide care,” Constantinescu says. Along with a team of researchers and engineers, she is now developing a smartphone app to improve the lives of head and neck cancer patients.
For most head and neck cancer patients a steak dinner is out of the question. Weakened swallowing muscles turn the simple pleasure of eating into a stressful and potentially lifethreatening experience. While swallowing exercises can help build strength, barriers to treatment can impede the road to recovery.
The app connects to a small device under the patient’s chin, which tracks the activity of muscles during swallowing exercises and provides real-time feedback. “It’s like a FitBit, but for your swallow,” explains Constantinescu. This makes it easier for patients to practise the exercises at home, while at the same time enabling clinicians to track progress remotely.
Speech-language pathologist Gabriela Constantinescu, ’05 BSc, ’08 MSc, experienced this first hand while working at the Institute for Reconstructive Sciences in Medicine. She saw patients face long waits to get in to see clinicians, and found the therapy to be time-consuming and inconvenient — often requiring multiple visits a week to the clinic.
With more than 70 per cent of head and neck cancer patients suffering from swallowing difficulties, Constantinescu’s research has the potential to improve the quality of life for thousands of Canadians by making therapy more accessible and effective.
Frustrated with the status quo, she returned to the University of Alberta, her alma mater, to pursue a PhD in rehabilitation science and help make a lasting difference in her field.
Donate online at uab.ca/rehab150
The rehabilitation needs for survivors of diseases such as cancer increases as our population ages. Your support of graduate students, like Constantinescu, helps generate the rehabilitation researchers and professionals our society needs for years to come.