
Paraplegic man walks with own legs again - DarkContinent
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/sep/24/paraplegic-man-walks-with-own-legs-again
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Animats
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.

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venomsnake
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.

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nsxwolf
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?

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kakali
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.

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etrautmann
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.

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adamwong246
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.

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

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

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noonespecial
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.

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

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

