People recovering from acute heart problems such as heart attack and heart surgery are more likely to develop habits to control heart attack risk factors when they meet regularly with cardiac "disease managers," according to researchers at Mayo Clinic in Rochester. These managers are nonphysician cardiac rehabilitation specialists who lead long-term follow-up programs that last three years.

Johns Hopkins undergraduates have designed and built a device to enable critically ill intensive care unit patients to leave their beds and walk while remaining tethered to essential life-support equipment. The invention allows doctors to better understand whether carefully supervised rehabilitation, as opposed to continuous sedation and bed rest, can improve the recovery of intensive care patients.

Rehabilitation specialists guiding injured workers back to full-time employment should factor unconventional work schedules into their assessments and planning, new research suggests.

Robotics engineers at Rice University are teaming with doctors from Memorial Hermann|TIRR to develop a PC-based system for physical rehabilitation.

Despite strong evidence that cardiac rehabilitation reduces disability and prolongs life, fewer than one in five people receive rehabilitation services after a heart attack or coronary bypass surgery, according to a Brandeis study in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.

Among stroke survivors, one common difficulty is foot drop, a partial leg paralysis that prevents the foot from lifting - causing instability and difficulty walking. Now, a new high-tech rehabilitation device - available in the New York City-area only at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center - helps these patients regain the ability to walk more naturally and improve mobility.

At age 32, Maggie Fermental suffered a stroke that left her right side paralyzed. After a year and a half of conventional therapy with minimal results, she tried a new kind of robotic therapy developed by MIT engineers. A study to appear in the April 2007 issue of the American Journal of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation shows that the device, which helped Fermental, also had positive results for five other severe stroke patients in a pilot clinical trial.