Mohammed Sbai, a clinical neuroscience professor, has seen how important rehabilitation can be after a traffic accident, stroke or other incident.
In 2000, his brother suffered a severe traumatic brain injury in a car accident in Morocco, and for the following years, Sbai was involved in his recovery and rehabilitation as both a brother and clinical neuroscience expert.
Sbai sponsored his brother and brought him to the U.S. for treatment that wasn’t available in Morocco, and his brother made a miraculous recovery. “Through the process of taking care of him for almost five years, I discovered how those treatment decisions are being made and the impact of those strategies on his health,” Sbai said.
This experience inspired Sbai to focus his professional interests on neurological rehabilitation and pursue it as a research topic. He even went back to school to get certified in the subject. Now, his research focuses on brain plasticity or neuroplasticity, which he described as the ability of the human brain to change, adapt and even heal itself in response to disease or trauma. “I'm trying to harvest the benefits of brain plasticity and apply them to neurological rehabilitation protocols for better outcomes,” he said.
Through the process of taking care of him for almost five years, I discovered how those treatment decisions are being made and the impact of those strategies on his health.
When his brother died in 2007 after returning to Morocco, Sbai remembered the discussions they had about helping Moroccan patients who lack access to the medical care his brother received in the U.S. “When he passed away, suddenly I just felt the burden of those discussions and with colleagues from the University of Utah and other U.S medical institutions, we started working on a project that morphed into a nonprofit, which then morphed into establishing the first American-inspired neurorehabilitation clinic in Morocco in 2015,” Sbai said.
During a visit to the clinic in the summer of 2017, Sbai helped treat a stroke patient who lost her speech and communicated by squeezing a person’s hand. Curiously, the woman was unable to differentiate sensations in her hand. It was like her hand’s sensory map was “scrambled,” Sbai said. He then had the idea of rubbing her fingers using several tools, and after about 45 minutes, the woman started to accurately sense her hand and fingers. He attributed this recovery to neuroplasticity.
“We had a lot of success with this strategy in Morocco, so I introduced this idea to a couple of therapists here,” Sbai said. After further investigation, Sbai noticed that sensory rehabilitation does not receive the attention it deserves, and a majority of neurorehabilitation professionals tend to focus on motor deficits. “Then I started thinking, ‘How can we deliver this treatment in an automated way, so that we take away the variability of a human intervention?’”
With that thought and the help of other U faculty and staff, he began working on a device that could provide the treatment in a precise, quantitative way.
Sbai disclosed the device to the Technology Licensing Office in 2023—his first invention disclosure at the U—and the TLO team filed a provisional patent application to protect Sbai’s innovative idea. Sbai is continuing his work on the device and developing prototype 2.0 with the hope it can improve outcomes, like the woman he successfully treated in Morocco.
