Life Span Institute Blog

Apprehension is expected before a traveler boards a flight, whether it’s anxiety about airline safety or worrying about a delayed flight.  Yet for people who depend on wheelchairs to move through the world, the possibility of damage to their chairs poses the biggest stressor of them all. Wheelchairs aren’t just an object or item to be checked like a suitcase for a flight; they are an extension of the user and a vital part of their daily lives.

A pioneering research project at KU may one day give voice to individuals robbed of their speech by neuromuscular diseases such as ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. 

The child in the chair looks like she’s preparing to play a video game. She leans toward the monitor in a darkened room, the dim light of the screen illuminating her face. A dot appears on the screen. But instead of zapping the dot with a game controller, she tracks its movement only with her eyes. Throughout the test, a camera mounted to the monitor records the movement in fine detail: the pace, the direction, the focus. 

We have all had moments when we chose to skip the gym and eat the piece of cake or take the extra helping, even though we knew that we wanted to lose weight. These decisions are impacted by delay discounting: in this case, the reward of eating fattening food is immediate, while the pay-off of good health and weight maintenance associated with exercising and avoiding unhealthy foods is largely delayed.

The science website PsyPost recently highlighted findings authored by Michael Amlung published in the journal Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging.

Karrie Shogren, director of the KU Center on Developmental Disabilities (KUCDD) will deliver her inaugural presentation as the Ross and Marianna Beach Distinguished Professor of Special Education at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 14 in the Kansas Room of the KU Memorial Union.