In the past few years, the Rehabilitation Interventions for Individuals with a Spinal Cord Injury in the Community (RIISC) interprovincial (Ontario and Quebec) team’s initiative discussed how altering EMD risk could reduce morbidity and mortality in adults living with SCI/D in the community. To that end, out of the many challenges identified by the team, three stood out: 1) the inconclusive body of evidence on the ability of the field of rehabilitation to implement primary prevention strategies that can modify physical activity levels, lipid profiles and diet behaviors to significantly reduce EMD risk exposure; 2) the low-quality evidence available in the field being further compromised by single-solution models often probed under restrictive designs (e.g., RCTs) applied to the highly variable SCI/D population; and 3) the disconnect between the provision of rehabilitation services and their evaluation by all involved stakeholders, as per the impact on health outcomes and cost-effectiveness. Over the course of this talk, attendees will be presented with some of the solutions proposed by the RIISC team, including the significant paradigm shift from current single-disease SCI/D models of care. The presentation will then cover the speaker’s research background on rehabilitation models based on sensory-motor integration, and how those models align with the RIISC proposal. Finally, the I WILL clinic – a novel site for clinical research at Lyndhurst – will be introduced and discussed as an outlet of innovative rehabilitation models towards holist SCI/D care

Dr. Wagner H. Souza is a former aspiring journalist turned clinician after being diagnosed with a severe health condition affecting his spine at age 19.  Almost two decades later, Wagner holds a Physical Therapist degree from Brazil and gained 10 years of experience working in neurorehabilitation. He is also certified in trauma, orthopedic and sports rehabilitation, in addition to holding a master’s degree in musculoskeletal assessment and intervention. Wagner’s research is focused on human sensory integration and motor control, mostly addressing gait, gaze and balance in the context of neurologic impairment. He completed his PhD in the Integrated Program in Neuroscience at McGill University, where he used virtual reality to assess and modify human gait patterns. After his PhD, Wagner joined a Medical Innovation Fellowship at Western University, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in the departments of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation and Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. At Hopkins, Wagner’s research aimed to investigate innovative strategies (e.g., inertial measurement units, phone apps, telehealth) to assess and treat gait and balance in the context of vestibular function in clinical and (e.g., vestibular schwannoma, Army veterans with TBI) and non-clinical (healthy older adults, astronauts) populations. Currently, Wagner is a postdoctoral fellow in the labs of Drs. Cathy Craven and Kristin Musselman at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute – Lyndhurst Centre.  He is working on new strategies to understand and prevent falls in SCI/D, along with the implementation of the I WILL clinic, which will offer innovative integrated rehabilitation designs for SCI/D.