Paraplegics learn to walk after years with the help of VR and exoskeletons | Hacker News Reader

Paraplegics learn to walk after years with the help of VR and exoskeletons

qz.com

49 pointsENadyr9 comments

I wonder how expensive it would be to build a patch that someone who suffered from excessive tension in a certain muscle could stick on, say, their lower back which would detect the level of tension. Then, using a bluetooth connection and an iPhone game, they could train themselves to become better at consciously relaxing that muscle.

Doesn't bluetooth have delay that would be nuisance to walking?

Bluetooth 4.0 maxes out at around 25Mbps. Bluetooth 5.0 is supposed to double that speed. As far as latency, that should depend on how far away the devices are from each other and how quick the movement is from device to device. You would encounter the same issues with wifi, but 802.11 ac allows for 500Mbps for a single link and up to 1Gbps for multiple links.

This is interesting to me. A lot of what I know about posture indicates that once you are conscious of your bad habits, fixing them isn't all that hard. Something like this could very easily give people a clear indication of what their bad posture is a result of, and pretty quickly help them out of it. The low tech version of this is posture taping [0], which works, but is probably a considerably less attractive option to most people, and certainly less targeted.

[0] http://www.physioadvisor.com.au/health/taping-techniques-upp...

The bit about regaining bladder and bowel control is particularly interesting as this wasn't part of the thing the exoskeleton would have simulated.

Yeah, the resiliency of the organic body is impressive. I would hazard a guess that similar therapy for stroke rehabilitation could be even more effective if one were able to actuate the hand like researchers in the OP have done with the legs. So far I've only seen therapy that is essentially VR equivalent of mirror box therapy https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278157406_Reinforce... I think I'm going to put an OpenEEG setup together...

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12270477

Ah, sorry for the double post, didn't see it originally!

No big. Just more evidence that luck and timing are huge factors as to what hits the front page.

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