(Technology Networks) – In another major clinical breakthrough of the Walk Again Project, a non-profit international consortium aimed at developing new neuro-rehabilitation protocols, technologies and therapies for spinal cord injury, two patients with paraplegia regained the ability to walk with minimal assistance, through the employment of a fully non-invasive brain-machine interface that does not require the use of any invasive spinal cord surgical procedure. The results of this study appeared on the May 1 issue of the journal Scientific Reports.
The two patients with paraplegia (AIS C) used their own brain activity to control the non-invasive delivery of electrical pulses to a total of 16 muscles (eight in each leg), allowing them to produce a more physiological walk than previously reported, requiring only a conventional walker and a body weight support system as assistive devices.
Overall, the two patients were able to produce more than 4,500 steps using this new technology, which combines a non-invasive brain-machine interface, based on a 16-channel EEG, to control a multi-channel functional electrical stimulation system (FES), tailored to produce a much smoother gait pattern than the state of the art of this technique. CONTINUE