An exoskeleton that enables movement and provides tactile feedback has helped eight paralysed people regain sensation and move previously paralysed muscles
“I FELT the ball!” yelled Juliano Pinto as he kicked off the Football World Cup in Brazil last year. Pinto, aged 29 at the time, lost the use of his lower body after a car accident in 2006. “It was the most moving moment,” says Miguel Nicolelis at Duke University in North Carolina, head of the Walk Again Project, which developed the thought-controlled exoskeleton that enabled Pinto to make his kick.
Since November 2013, Nicolelis and his team have been training Pinto and seven other people with similar injuries to use the exoskeleton – a robotic device that encases the limbs and converts brain signals into movement.
The device also feeds sensory information to its wearer, which seems to have partially reawakened their nervous system. When Nicolelis reassessed his volunteers after a year of training, he found that all eight people had regained sensations and the ability to move muscles in their once-paralysed limbs.
“Nobody expected it at all,” says Nicolelis, who presented the results at the Brain Forum in Lausanne, Switzerland, on 31 March. “When we first saw the level of recovery, there was not a single person in the room with a dry eye.”
But the odds of recovery are slashed for people diagnosed with a complete spinal cord injury, in which the nerves are thought to be severed. This results in no feeling below the site of the injury. People can spend a lifetime feeling disconnected from their lower body, and tend to receive less physical therapy as a result. Just over a third of the 12,500 people who experience a spinal cord injury every year in the US have complete injuries.
