Infinity WalkAbout at Northeast Center for Special Care

Ann Belcher, CEO of Northeast Center sees the Infinity WalkAbout and related Infinity Walk method as cutting edge:  “The Infinity Walk^® is another way that the state-of-art specialty rehabilitation programs at Northeast Center for Special Care use innovative approaches to therapy in the rehabilitation and recovery of our Resident-Neighbors with traumatic brain injury.”
 

Excerpts from Northeast Center for Special Care website:

                "When staff at the Northeast Center for Special Care (a cutting-edge traumatic brain injury rehabilitation facility located in upstate New York) learned of the new Infinity WalkAbout, they immediately saw the possible benefits for the rehabilitation of individuals with traumatic brain injury."

                                    Photo: Northeast Center for Special Care; Lake Katrine, NY

Mike Plante, RPT, Director of Rehabilitation at Northeast Center for Special Care explains:
"One of the obvious benefits of the Infinity WalkAbout^® over the traditional parallel bars is that the individual can continue walking without having to stop every few feet as with regular parallel bars. Therapists report that they can appreciate the effects of what they are working on with someone and watch how they have to move and turn their body to walk in a way that is much more natural for them than simply walking in a straight line.

The Infinity WalkAbout^® is a collaboration between movement and sensory cognitive processing. The theory behind it is that while someone is walking the therapist challenges them with external stimuli. We can use a board with letters and numbers which are almost like a large eye chart - our Resident-Neighbors have to concentrate on and attend to. This helps people use more areas of their brain than simply walking alone. We also utilize tasks and objects as external stimuli".

Gerry Brooks, MA, CCC, CBIT, Brain Injury Program Director at Northeast Center for Special Care says "Attention is almost always impaired following brain injury and re-integrating attention into walking, talking, and the performance of other tasks is an ongoing challenge in brain injury rehabilitation. Infinity Walk® provides new ways to integrate physical, occupational, and speech-language therapies to systematically improve attentional capacities that allow the individual to meet both the physical and cognitive demands of walking and many other tasks. In fact, we expect that we can use the Infinity Walk as a basis for maximizing attention to improve almost any ability."