Mission Moment: Recuperating from a Stroke in Cutting-Edge Style

Rocking her round, black-framed prism glasses, 76-year-old Katherine Thurber of Mobile, Alabama, is focused on recovering from a stroke. The glasses help correct posture in patients following stroke and brain injuries by altering the way space is perceived and affecting how their body reacts to what it sees, thereby improving their balance and peripheral awareness. Visual impairments are common after brain injury, and early intervention is critical to maximize outcomes. With that in mind, Shepherd Center established a Vision Clinic in 2019 that provides a team-oriented model of care, with an occupational therapist, a neuro-optometrist, and a physiatrist collaborating with the patient and primary therapy team. 

Vision Clinic Coordinator Helen Burke, OT, works alongside Janna Iyer, FCOVD, to conduct weekly consultations with patients with brain injuries. “For a lot of our brain injury or stroke patients, their awareness of where their ‘middle’ is can be off,” Helen says. “Instead of sitting or standing up straight, they feel like their middle is back here,” she says, tilting dramatically in her chair. This “pusher syndrome” presents serious issues with balance and increases risk of falls. 

The Vision Clinic is working with Kemtai, an artificial intelligence platform, to develop a more precise tool for assessing patients’ posture and then evaluating in real time their improvement after wearing the prism glasses. The standalone web application can be used on a smartphone and doesn’t require any bulky or expensive equipment. Ultimately, Kemtai and Shepherd aim to co-develop rehabilitation exercises, using this innovative technology to improve patients’ quality of life. 

Katherine Thurber’s stroke in August 2024 affected the right side of her body, so her visual center was one foot to the right and back of where it should be. After wearing the prism eyeglasses, she began to see improvement immediately. “From Day One, they started working,” Katherine says. “I wore them religiously for three or four weeks. And when I left Shepherd, the glasses had done what they were supposed to do. You have to trick the brain to be right again.”

After six weeks in therapy at Shepherd, Katherine returned home to Mobile with her daughter, Mary Esther Elliott, who has seen firsthand the improvements in her mother’s posture and balance. Mary Esther recalls going to visit her mother at Shepherd Center on Labor Day weekend but finding that Katherine was on an outing to a nearby Chick-fil-A. Mary Esther hurried to the restaurant, where she found Katherine sitting in a booth enjoying her lunch. “She turned to me, wearing the prism glasses, and it was really emotional,” Mary Esther says. “That was the first time I had seen her sitting in anything but a wheelchair in a month, and the glasses helped her get there.”

Written by Teresa Weaver

This story is an excerpt from “Mission Moments: 50 Years of Rebuilding Lives One Moment at a Time,” a book celebrating Shepherd’s 50th anniversary in 2025.