Dr. Sherri Wallis, PT/DPT is the Clinical Director at BIONIK Labs.
BIONIK Labs offer rehabilitation and mobility solutions for the hospital, clinic and home. BIONIK state its goal is to: “Enable the growing millions of people with movement-impairments to lead fuller and more independent lives by fostering hope, recovery and independence with evidence-based technologies, spanning the continuum of rehabilitation care.”
What made you want to pursue your chosen career path?
Eight years ago, I transitioned away from clinical practice as a treating therapist when an opportunity came to me through a recruiter. As I wasn’t pursuing the role directly, the recruiter described the position, explaining I would be working with exoskeletons and robotics, and I would also be working with the top leaders in the field of neurorehabilitation doing clinical education. I couldn’t say “no” to that. You see, at the time, the path to a non-clinical practice role from clinical practice was not as common as it is now.
Five years later, I temporarily moved from Dallas to Boston to pursue the non-clinical path when a new opportunity arose to work with BIONIK as their new Clinical Director. In my current position, I assist with some research and development and continue to work with robotics as a clinical tool to improve arm function in stroke rehabilitation.
What keeps you motivated to work with stroke rehabilitation?
If you had asked me a few years ago, I would have likely answered, ‘Seeing patients achieve their goals or get back to where they were before their stroke.” However, in a non-clinical training role, you don’t see patients’ progress from start to finish. You only see more of a snapshot of a patient’s progress in a short window of time during training sessions with other clinicians. So, my motivation now comes from believing in the purpose of what you’re doing and the specific medical device used when training therapists.
I’ve been very lucky that the devices I’ve been responsible for training therapists to use over the years have been truly remarkable pieces of technology with proven research to back them up. In particular, BIONIK’s InMotion ARM robot, the “grandchild” of the MIT-Manus, is the most researched robot in rehabilitation today. I’ve had the pleasure of not only teaching people about how it works but also showing patients how much more it can do for them in the very early phases of their recovery, when motivation is at its lowest point. Seeing the “lightbulb moment” when patients realise they can perform an activity they thought they had lost is very rewarding.
What advice would you give yourself at the start of your career?
Over the past 30 years, my career has seen continuous changes in the healthcare field. During the beginning of my career, during the ‘heyday’ of rehabilitation, neurologic patients could participate in therapy over the course of months-long inpatient rehabilitation stays. Home assessments included multiple therapists over hours-long outings to be sure patients and families were ready for discharge.
Now, the pace of rehabilitation has changed dramatically. Stroke patients have an average stay in inpatient rehabilitation of 14 days. In addition to that, technology has expanded exponentially. When I started in this industry, we never dreamed of things like robots or virtual reality systems. The best advice I could have given myself would have been to encourage myself to expand my horizons as the rehabilitation landscape changes. Fortunately, I’ve been able to accomplish that over the course of my career by researching new techniques and devices to use in practice and by maintaining a clinical curiosity along the way.
What are the daily challenges you face in your role, and how do you deal with them?
As BIONIK’s Clinical Director, my biggest challenge is missing the day-to-day patient interaction that was a part of my life for so many years. A special bond develops between therapists and patients and it is very gratifying to see when a patient you’ve been working with for weeks at a time has succeeded in meeting their goals, whatever they might be. That’s why finding the motivation to go to work every day isn’t hard because you can see the immediate result of your efforts.
When you’re working remotely, as you do in this job, even direct interaction with colleagues in the field is sparse, and you have to find the daily motivation to achieve the tasks at hand when immediate feedback isn’t possible. It is very satisfying to learn of the success stories of the hundreds of stroke patients using our robots each week; as well as knowing what I do has an impact on multiple therapists across our network of healthcare and rehabilitation facilities.
With stroke rehabilitation, what is something you believe the general public needs to be more aware of?
Something I didn’t think much about before, and it is now one of the things that I speak about the most when I’m teaching therapists how to use the InMotion robot, is that the arm needs more attention during rehabilitation than it traditionally had over the years. From patients, families, to therapists, they focus their energy on walking to get from one place to the next; however, they tend to forget about focusing on what you do once you get there.
Occupational therapy (OT) and arm recovery are more difficult skills to rehabilitate for many reasons, including the complexity of movement, gravity working against you instead of for you as it does in the leg, and the amount of ‘brain space’ that is necessary to complete these complex movement sequences for Activities of Daily Living (ADL) performance. Because of this, even after significant rehabilitation, many stroke patients don’t achieve functional use of their arms. For this reason, I believe it is crucial for hospitals and rehabilitation facilities to provide extensive support and prioritize OTs who play a vital role in facilitating the treatment process, enabling patients to regain function in their arms. Healthcare executives can support OT’s with further education and evidence based-treatment for their patients, rather than relying solely on what we’ve done in the past. There are many new opportunities for improvement in rehabilitation that can be applied with some research into the latest peer-reviewed techniques.
What is the best quality someone working with stroke rehabilitation can have?
Through my years of experience as a therapist, I have learned that the greatest asset someone working with stroke rehabilitation can have is clinical curiosity. Even today, I have always looked for the answers to questions about a new diagnosis I was seeing or learned more about a new treatment technique that a colleague is using. In addition, I’ve taken the time to do front-end research on techniques and devices so that I could assist decision-makers in determining what devices and techniques would serve our specific community the best. Stroke rehabilitation, in particular, is so complex. Each patient can present with such different symptoms; it’s important for us to have as many tools as possible in our toolbox to meet the individual needs of each client we see.
Find out more about BIONIK here.
