One of four girls, Cara Negri’s favorite book growing up was about an amputee named Michelle who went on to do everything. Cara has helped develop video motion analysis to analyze how people move and how to help them walk. Her company, PnO Data Solutions has developed tools that are widely used in the rehab and physical therapy market. This episode was originally released on October 24, 2018.
TRANSCRIPT:
Intro: 0:01
Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade, the podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We'll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them. We'll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace. Video motion analysis of disabilities or anyone in motion. That's what we're going to talk about this morning on Radio Cade. I have with me Cara Negri, who is involved in a company that is taking this to market or is already in the market. So welcome Cara.
Cara Negri: 0:52
Thank you.
Richard Miles: 0:52
So before we begin talking about you and about the company, why don't you tell me exactly what the underlying technology is and what it does. We'll come back and talk later about the applications and so on.
Cara Negri: 1:06
Sure. Basically video is becoming the ultimate medium for us to communicate with people. It tells a story much broader than a image or a paragraph. And so with 2D motion analysis or video analysis, we can take our smartphone and take a video of someone moving and then we can actually measure some of the progress that a person is making. So let's say you hurt your shoulder and you're not able to lift it 100 percent up, we can take a video of you now doing the best that you can and we can measure that angle and then we can go through some rehab, maybe provide some intervention with a brace, and afterwards we can measure that intervention in the same way that we did by measuring that angle again and measure how well you're doing. And that also gives you the person that is going through this process, the feedback to see how you're doing in your progress of rehabilitation versus me just shouting feedback to you or you're not doing good enough or that you need to lift higher. When you can actually see it, it actually connects to your brain a lot faster and you can actually improve your function through that bio feedback. Little to no response by me, I don't have to intervene as much
Richard Miles: 2:20
I see. And so Cara, just so I understand, is the technology here, do you use, for instance multiple cameras or is it a software solution which you're taking video in theory from anywhere, like a smartphone and you'd simply analyzing it with that software?
Cara Negri: 2:34
Yes. So you can take video in any way you want. So if you want to use a really high fancy camera, high definition camera, then you can or you can use your smartphone because smartphone cameras are actually pretty good these days. So it's about the practicality of it.
Richard Miles: 2:51
I see.
Cara Negri: 2:52
Um, we all may have seen how Avatar is made with lots of pinpoints on the person and we're tracking their motion and we can do lots of animation with it. And that is the 3D motion analysis that some people may have seen. And that's great for research and for higher capture of what we need to find out about a person. But for the practical uses of physical therapy or prosthetics and orthotics, we don't need that much information. We need one dimensional or two dimension