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- All Subjects: Movement Planning
- All Subjects: Telemedicine
- All Subjects: speech science
- Creators: Liss, Julie
- Member of: Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, telemedicine usage in America has experienced extreme peaks as a method of maintaining social distancing for medical staff and patients. While there have been numerous significant positive effects from increasing this practice, there are also significant risks to be explored. Patients and physicians have been navigating new technology, new protocols, and new dynamics at a high rate. Doctors using telemedicine are required to rely more heavily on their judgment with less data than usual to support their hypotheses. This results in a wide variety of potential complications that can be detrimental to patients and physicians alike. Though negative outcomes are not nearly the majority, it is clear that for telemedicine to function at its fullest capacity, the limitations of its technology must be defined and communicated. A survey was distributed to physicians currently practicing telemedicine to understand more about the usage increase in telemedicine and the incidence rates of telemedicine-related complications. The results showed that although the impact of telemedicine has been largely positive, there certainly are risks that must be considered and prepared for. Thus, it is the responsibility of healthcare systems to ensure that their policies are current and appropriate in proportion to their usage of telemedicine to better protect and prepare patients and doctors for this new frontier of medicine.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a non-invasive brain stimulation technique used in a variety of research settings, including speech neuroscience studies. However, one of the difficulties in using TMS for speech studies is the time that it takes to localize the lip motor cortex representation on the scalp. For my project, I used MATLAB to create a software package that facilitates the localization of the ‘hotspot’ for TMS studies in a systematic, reliable manner. The software sends TMS pulses at certain locations, collects electromyography (EMG) data, and extracts motor-evoked potentials (MEPs) to help users visualize the resulting muscle activation. In this way, users can systematically find the subject’s hotspot for TMS stimulation of the motor cortex. The hotspot detection software was found to be an effective and efficient improvement on previous localization methods.