Transcriber: Annie Boyd Reviewer: Amanda Zhu
It's a pleasure and a privilege to be here this evening
to share with you and to introduce you to a topic that is really near and dear,
and for which our team is incredibly passionate about,
and that is seeing not if we can evolve a whole new human
but seeing if we can simply help the humans that are on this planet
rewalk again.
So I want to start off, if you'll indulge me a minute,
with sort of a series of questions to help illustrate a point.
So, by a show of hands,
could I get everyone who got up this morning
to raise their hands?
OK, there's a few hands not raised out there,
(Laughs)
but we've got almost complete penetrance.
Can I get a show of hands by those who had something to eat today?
Maybe you made breakfast,
went to lunch.
We're going to get a little bit more personal.
How many people have actually visited a lavatory -
gone to the bathroom or brushed their teeth this morning?
Again, everyone.
So, those types of activities
fall into what are called activities of daily living.
This is sort of a -
ADLs is a term that's used
by groups such as the World Health Organization
and others
to describe the level of disability that patients or people might have.
They use it to compare geographic regions,
to compare disease,
and they assess how much is a person able to complete the tasks,
and others, that we just discussed.
So now, let's see how quick people are in the audience.
Does anyone recognize at least one common factor
that all of those activities you all completed this morning or today
had in common?
(Audience) You use your legs.
You use your legs.
You have to walk or get up or move to accomplish them.
If you step back
and you think about all the people that are actually unable to do that,
it is really a very sobering and humbling thought,
and it is one that sort of drives our team.
One can ask,
Why is it that you can't move?
Why is it that I couldn't get up out of bed? Right?
There's a lot of different reasons that that could happen -
maybe an accident, disease, age?
It's a lot harder for me to move than it was 10 years ago, right?
But the disease or the condition that I want to speak to you about today,
that afflicts many around this planet,
is the disability and mobility that occurs because of stroke.
So this is a picture that I took recently of one of my favourite places.
That's Mount Rainier.
And I want to just use this picture, and others,
to illustrate a point.
So in the United States,
there's 800,000 people that have a stroke per year.
It's a big number, right?
But it's less than one percent.
In this audience,
roughly one in 25 people will have a stroke before they pass.
We think about the United States,
but what I want to challenge you today is to think about the rest of the world.
So while there's 800,000 strokes that occur in the United States,
there's 15 million strokes that occur worldwide.
If we switch that from the number of strokes that are occurring each year
to the number of people that survive from strokes,
in the United States, there's 8,000,000 people.
We have a very good, robust health system, right?
And we have quick access to healthcare,
which helps many of those stroke victims become stroke survivors.
Amazingly, around the world, there's 62 million stroke survivors.
Importantly,
around the world, stroke incidence is increasing at a much higher clip
than it is in the United States.
For example, in China,
it is the fastest growing and most costly disease
that they have in their country.
So,
if we ask ourselves,
What is the burden to that disease?
Organizations like World Health shift the way that they talk about it
so it's less about individuals,
and they talk about something called disability-adjusted life years,
or DALYs.
And what these are -
it's a very complex calculation,
much too in depth for this type of conversation -
but what they do is they say,
'OK, there is a subset of people that die because of a stroke or some other disease,
but there is a large set that continue to live.'
But their disability takes away years on their life.
They will pass earlier than others
because they're not able to achieve
sort of the normal daily living activities that we discussed in the first slide.
So, if we ask that for stroke,
every year, there's almost 44 million disability-adjusted life years
lost around the planet.
What's even more amazing to me
is that when you look at all of the disability-adjusted life years lost -
accident, disease, things like HIV, right?
all of it -
stroke accounts for 3.2% of those lost years.
Part of the reason is because post-stroke, if you survive,
the disability is so debilitating.
What leads into the idea that I hope you take home with you tonight
and become maybe as charged as we are about,
is shown in colours on this picture, which is from a report,
from a World Health Organization report on disabilities around the world.
And what it shows by colour
is that the lighter colours
are fewer disability-adjusted lost years.
The darker colours are more disability-adjusted life years lost.
OK?
So what you can immediately see in this picture
is that the burden for stroke in the Western cultures -
Canada, America, Australia, Western Europe -
that burden is much less than it is to the developing world,
significantly and severely less,
because if you survive a stroke in the developing world,
there is no rehabilitation center,
there is no clinic to help you learn how to cope again.
You are simply sent home.
This is a graph -
There's a lot of different ways to assess this.
This is just one that I picked from another World Health report,
World Health Organization report.
And what it looks at is physiotherapists
per, I think, 10,000 people in the country.
And as you can see in Western cultures -
New Zealand, Australia, USA, Finland -
there are many, many, many, many more times the number of therapists
available to - when you get down to countries like Senegal or Pakistan,
there are none - per 10,000.
They don't exist.
So, this moves
into what I would like to get across with you tonight,
which is Cathy Stinear,
who at the international Stroke Rehab Roundtable
just a short while ago said,
'While we've had many, many therapies and advancements in prevention of stroke,
in the treatment of stroke,
there have been no new technologies in the rehabilitation of stroke.'
So thus, what that means is we can help you live,
but we can't help you live after, right?
So we can keep you alive,
but what we are really going to do,
especially in developing countries around the world,
is we are going to move you back to your family,
and your family is going to have to take care of you,
or your community will have to take care of you.
So, as was mentioned,
I'm the CEO and founder of a company called TAO Life Sciences.
We develop and invest in early-stage medical technologies.
We like big problems, right?
That's an area where our engineers, who are awesome,
can apply their skills.
And so we saw this as a challenge.
This is not a very good picture for a variety of reasons,
not the least of which is the person who's walking on that device is me.
(Laughs)
And what this device is called is a CAREN device,
Computer Assisted Rehabilitation Environment.
It is the absolute state-of-the-art
for treating and helping stroke patients' rehab.
These devices cost well over a million dollars.
In fact, in the United States, we are only aware of seven of them.
One of those devices is at the University of South Florida,
with one of the most amazing scientists and engineers
that I've ever interacted with,
a guy by the name of Kyle Reed.
Kyle has one of these devices;
in fact, he was the first university in the United States to receive one.
And what Kyle said was,
'It is an honour and a gift for me to be able to have this device,
and there's a lot that we can do with this.
And the first thing that we want to do is see if we can take this technology
and compress it to something that could be used at home.'
Most places around the world aren't going to get million-dollar devices
to help rehab their patients.
But if we could take the technology, the ideas that are in that device,
and condense it into something people could take home,
how powerful would that be in places like Nigeria or Southeast Asia?
And that's about the time that we got involved with Kyle.
And over the last few years,
what came from that, what you see here,
is a prototype of a device that we call a Gait Enhancing Mobile Shoe.
And what this device does
is it recognizes that that gait problem that a stroke patient has
is fundamentally a re-learning issue.
All of us learn to walk at a very early age -
most of us, maybe around one, right?
And it is amongst the most engrained aspects of activities
that go on in our brain.
To re-learn how to do that
when your brain is still telling you 'This is what you should do'
is an almost impossible complex.
And what it takes
are devices that have full surround video,
tactile, feedback, auditory information,
and they alter the way
that the patient's legs are trying to re-learn how to walk.
That's what it used to take.
What Kyle recognized
was that if you take fundamentally what is going on on a split-belt treadmill
and destabilize the patient's foot from the bottom
by putting something on it,
you can trick the brain into learning how to walk again.
This is a picture of one of the patients who went through our clinical trial.
She's post-stroke seven years.
So what that means
is it's been seven years since she's had rehabilitation,
seven years since she's been surviving,
and in that time, she's never been able to walk without assistance.
She needs some sort of device
and in some cases, somebody helping her walk.
When we asked her,
after four weeks of using our device,
which you can sort of see on her foot, down here,
what this device had meant to her,
she said the following:
'Last week I walked into church for the first time without my cane.'
That's what the most important thing was to her.
But what that meant to us
was that we could take stroke patients
who had been walking incorrectly for seven years,
and help them walk well enough
so they could get rid of their walker or get rid of their cane.
So, what do I want to leave you with?
So if we can take one small step to the moon,
which we all know we've successfully done and is an amazing feat,
can't we also help the 50 million people around the world re-walk again,
who suffered a stroke and have survived it?
We say we can.
Thank you.
(Applause)