Thinking the Thought and Walking the Walk: How Technology is Helping Paraplegics to Walk Again12/2/2015 By Mae Grewal Writer Most people don’t really think about walking. When we want to get someplace, it just sort of happens—our brain send signals down our spinal cord into our peripheral nervous system to our motor nerves which cause our leg muscles to contract and suddenly we’re moving across the room to get to where we want to go without having to worry about the details, leaving our mind free to think about the essay that’s due in 12 hours or that cute guy at the RHO or the abysmal state of our political candidates for presidency. Unfortunately not everyone is this lucky. Fortunately, technology is evening the gap. Spinal cord injuries can render a person varying degrees of paralyzed, depending on at which vertebrae the injury occurred. Paraplegia is a result of a spinal cord injury that severs the nerves in the spinal cord rendering the bottom half of the body unable to move. Paraplegic patients have little hope of ever walking again without the assistance of expensive robotic limbs the route for the signal between their brain and legs is damaged. New research is looking to bypass that destroyed route entirely, however, by establishing a different way for the brain to relay walking signals to the leg muscles—and the crazy awesome thing? So far it’s working. A 26 year-old man was wheel chair bound for 5 years after his accident, but now he has become the first paraplegic to walk using impulses created from his own brain. He was outfitted with an EEG cap that monitored his brain waves and was able to distinguish between walking, sitting, and standing signals that the man actively thought. The cap then activates a electrical stimulator at his waist to create the muscle contractions to move the right leg forward, then the left, and so on, for an actual walking motion. He doesn’t have to actively think about each individual leg, but rather about the general motion of walking, and the waist monitor translates that into the more complicated individual muscle movements for him. But even this generalized thinking about walking took a lot of practice. While the brain does not lose the capacity to remember how to walk even if the body is paralyzed, his brain needed to be trained to actively voice that motion, which they practiced by hooking his EEG cap up to a computer avatar that he learned to control. Then, he needed to build up the muscles in his legs to support his own weight again, and finally, after 19 weeks, he was able to control his own movement and weight on a 3.5-meter course on the ground. While this alone is a breakthrough in the field of reestablishing function and control in handicapped persons, there is still a ways to go in perfecting this technology and making it accessible to all those who could benefit from it. The various machines that helped this man walk are quite unwieldy, and ideally should be minimized into implanted brain and muscle chips for maximum convenience. Furthermore, researchers are working on improving the precision of the computer system that recognized the will to move, as it currently still confuses walking intent with balancing intent, something our brains and nerves manage simultaneously. The potential is definitely there though to reintroduce the world of walking—and maybe even someday the world of walking without having to concentrate on it—to paraplegic patients. Works Cited
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/sep/24/paraplegic-man-walks-with-own-legs-again
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AuthorsThe authors of these blog posts are staff writers of The Triple Helix at Georgetown University. Archives
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