Paraplegic man walks with own legs again | Hacker News Reader

Paraplegic man walks with own legs again

theguardian.com

55 pointsDarkContinent19 comments

That's a strange arrangement. It's really robotic walking, controlled by computers and gyros, but using the patient's own legs.

"Rather than having a precise control of each leg, the patient activates the system with a general concept of walking. It’s not so much that he’s thinking ‘move the right leg and than move the left leg’. What happens is that the computer system detects when the brain waves change from a state of not walking into a state of walking. When the computer detects that a person is walking, based on these brain waves, it turns on the electrical stimulator, which starts creating muscle contractions in the right leg first, and then the left leg; right leg, left leg. And then it keeps on doing this automatically until he stops thinking about walking, then it shuts it off and keeps him in a standing position. So really he has the control of a general concept of walk or not walk.”

So this is nothing like repairing the spinal cord or getting control info from it.

Still it is infinitely better than current solutions.

The same way that bionic eyes give only 30x30 pixels (yet) and they are still infinitely better than being blind. We are moving in the right direction. That is the important stuff.

Bandwidth needed to actually walk is not so small (keeping balance, etc)

It's probably easier to put this in hardware than sending it to the brain and back.

I would say it is still a very big achievement. Imagine you being able to do something you were not before, just thinking about that.

The first time I remember seeing something like this was maybe in the late 80s or early 90s. On one of those news magazine shows like ABC's 20/20 or something like that.

I don't remember it being any more or less impressive than what I'm seeing in this video. It seemed utterly impractical and unusable outside of the support infrastructure built for it in the hospital environment. Is there really any breakthrough or advancement here?

I remember the same thing. I thought there was some form of fraud associated with this because the electrodes would only work for a little while. I thought there was a malpractice suit about patients being left with a bunch of unremoved wires in their legs.

The EEG signals used in this study are inherently quite noisy and low bandwidth and are unlikely to yield a clinically useful neural prosthetic device. There are alternatives, but these usually involve (a completely reasonable and clinically justifiable) surgery.

Intracortical electrode arrays are used by the Braingate program and other BMI researchers, provide much higher bandwidth, signal to noise, robustness, and are likely necessary for real-world utility for tetra or paraplegic individuals. Since people like disclosing things here, I work in a lab that's one of the Braingate sites and we're biased towards implantable arrays, as no other system can currently in 2015 achieve the same levels of performance.

This is wonderful. The human body is complex but it is still a finite machine and it can be repaired. Interfacing with the nervous system is a problem that can be solved in our lifetime.

we need to rapidly enter the age where tech can address issues like this to make life easier for people with these disabilities.

We are in that age.

I'm not sure why you believe that. There's an incredible amount of work that remains and innovation happens over decades. There's certainly a lot of room for improvement.

We are entering that age because tech is addressing issues like this and has made life easier for the paraplegic man.

I'm not sure it's made life easier for him yet. He walked 3.5 metres, but how frustrating would it be to lose the use of your legs and then be tantalized by something sort-of-like walking again, but within very controlled situations? But the promise of what's to come is fantastic - my dad's a lifelong paraplegic due to polio and although this tech is too late for him, it's wonderful to think others may have a chance.

This age won't come anytime soon in a world where hundreds of billions $ of capital are thrown into social-media-mobile-app economy.

So, umm, how is it exactly that you found out this exciting news about this and other medical breakthroughs? We could be doing a lot more medical research and a lot less social networking. We could also be doing a lot less medical research and a lot more other things. Those statements are always true and almost never useful.

Last I checked healthcare R&D outspends VC by about 3:1 in the US.

i feel the cynical post amigo. i feel it.

One of those hats and a $100 VR google, and I'm set for life. And batteries.

From what I've heard, there were tons of these stories in the newspapers at the time of Jesus.

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