Paralysed man uses ‘brain power’ to walk 12 feet

A team of scientists has successfully re-routed the signals from a paraplegic man’s brain to his knees, allowing him to walk using his own legs for the first time in five years.

There’s not much a man can do about it when he loses control of its hands and legs after suffering a spinal cord accident, and since ways to treat these issues have been found, majority are cumbersome and pretty expensive.

This is the first time that a person with complete paralysis in both legs (paraplegia) due to spinal cord injury was able to walk without relying on manually controlled robotic limbs, as with previous walking aid devices.

A paraplegic man has been able to walk again using the power of his brain alone.

Physical training to recondition and strengthen the man’s leg muscles was also needed.

“Walking is a very fundamental behavior for us”, he said, pointing out that sitting can affect a person’s cardiovascular health or their bladder control.

“This non-invasive system for leg muscle stimulation is a promising method and is an advance of our current brain-controlled systems that use virtual reality or a robotic exoskeleton”. At the other, the signals sent by the brain arrived at electrodes attached to the paralyzed muscles.

Those signals were then picked up by an electroencephalogram (EEG) he wore as a cap and were transmitted to a computer for processing by a special algorithm that could isolate the messages related only to leg motion and convert them to signals that would stimulate the patient’s muscles to walk. Over the 19 week testing period, he gained more control and performed more tests per visit. During this experiment, his brainwaves were read through an EEG machine to determine how his brain worked when he felt he was walking. The nerves do not grow back and often scar tissue forms at the site of the damage.

In reintroducing the concept of walking to the brain, virtual reality mental training was employed, whereby the patient was able to control the movements of an avatar. Researchers from the University of California, Irvine, described in the Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation how they helped the patient.

In future, the electrode cap used in the study to record brain signals is likely to be replaced by hidden implants.

“Once we’ve confirmed the usability of this noninvasive system, we can look into invasive means, such as brain implants”, said senior researcher Zoran Nenadic, DSc, of the University of California Irvine, in the release. Though Fritz was supported and only walked haltingly for 12 feet, the research is being heralded as a milestone – so far, paralyzed patients have only be able to walk using suits like that from Ekso Bionics. “However, independent over-ground walking is still some way off, not least because the issue of maintaining balance hasn’t yet been addressed”.