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Dutch athlete Monique van der Vorst became paralyzed from the hip down during a surgical operation when she was 13 years old, and used a wheelchair afterward. She also suffered a spinal cord injury in 2008. Meanwhile, she became a cyclist, using her hands for propulsion, and won two silver medals at the 2008 Paralympics, as well as other athletic honors. Then van der Vorst was involved in another crash last year when she was hit by a bicycle. While recovering, she began to feel tingling in her feet! Months of therapy followed while van der Vorst regained the use of her legs.
Doctors have no explanation for her amazing recovery. Some believe the trauma of her last accident may have jolted her body back into activity.
But the realities of her new-found joy also put an immediate end to a successful athletic career.
“Although walking is the best thing you could do in life, I immediately missed the sport, the people and the challenges,” van der Vorst said.
Rehabilitation and physiotherapy with an athletic focus strengthened her and as soon as she sat on a bike she again wanted to give it a try.
But van der Vorst has a new goal. She has signed with a professional cycling team as an able-bodied athlete, and is training to compete in the 2016 Olympics. Link -via Buzzfeed, where you can see more pictures.
(Image credit: Bas Czerwinski/AP)
Martin Mireles has been paralyzed from the neck down for nearly twenty years. He can maneuver a mobility chair by steering it with his mouth, but a new magnetic tongue stud developed by researchers at the Northwestern University School of Medicine makes it a lot easier:
Mr. Mireles, 37, tested the equipment one recent afternoon by guiding a wheelchair through an obstacle course lined with trash cans. Mouth closed, he shifted the magnet to travel forward and backward, left and right.[...]
To operate the system, the user wears a headset with sensors that pick up magnetic signals from the tongue ring. Moving the tongue to the mouth’s upper left corner, for instance, moves the wheelchair forward. (The researchers hope that in the future, touching each tooth could signal a different command, from turning on the television to answering the phone to opening a door.)
Researchers decided to use the tongue because they wanted to take advantage of some of the functions a severely disabled person still had. The tongue does not tire easily, they said, and it is not usually affected by a spinal cord injury because it is directly connected to the brain through a cranial nerve.
Link -via Gizmodo | Photo: Steve Kagan/NYT
A hit-and-run accident five years ago left Rob Summers paralyzed from the waist down. Doctors said he would never walk again, but thanks to a new type of therapy, he can now stand on his own.
Summers’ injury disrupted the nerve pathway that normally triggers walking. Researchers implanted an electrical stimulator at the base of the spine that – along with special exercises – allowed his legs to move without input from the brain.
“I stand about an hour a day,” Summers says. “I can move my toes ankles knees, hips all on command.”
He’s also made other meaningful progress – regaining bladder and sexual function. But he’s still wheelchair-bound, and doctors cannot say whether he’ll walk again on his own. But, every day, he remembers the first time he stood up.
“It’s that moment that continues to give me the hope for tomorrow, and the future for this project – and helping out millions of other people in my same situation,” Summer says.
Summers’ therapy is in the experimental stage, and the latest results are published in the journal Lancet. Link -via Geekologie
Charlie and Spike are two very cute kittens that are normal in all respect, except when they hear a sudden noise:
at the slightest sound, the kittens respond by collapsing and falling into a rigid paralysis which lasts about a minute before they return to normal. This condition has hardly ever before been diagnosed in a cat, is rarely found in dogs and is more common in goats.
See a video clip of the fainting goat kittens over at VideoSift: Link
Israeli researchers have developed an interface that can be controlled by breathing through the nose. This technology could be used to help people with limited mobility gain more independence:
The “sniff controller,” as it is known, is worn externally via a rubber tube not unlike the ones often used in hospitals for patients who need oxygen. The nasal device is not universal, as about a quarter of all people in a healthy control group were found to have insufficient volitional control over their soft palate, the part of your nasal passageway that lets you regulate the strength of your sniffs. But for those with sufficient soft palate control, the sniff controller gave test subjects a new degree of freedom.[...]
The team also created an interface for controlling an electric wheelchair using the sniff detector (two successive sniffs in = forward, two successive sniffs out = backward, etc.) and tested it on ten healthy patients. Again, they found that after a bit of practice the control group could easily navigate the wheelchair, so they put a man paralyzed from the neck down in the driver’s seat. To their amazement, they found that after just 15 minutes a paraplegic can become quite skilled at navigating a wheelchair using the sniff detector.
Link | Image: PNAS
Hayden Allen hasn’t walked in five years, but in this video, he’s able to move around using a new type of exoskeleton called REX:
Called REX, short for “robotic exoskeleton”, the legs weigh 38 kg (84lb) and are individually made for each user.
The first pair is expected to sell for $150,000 (£97,600) the equivalent cost of 20 standard wheelchairs.
The inventors claim that due to the upright and mobile nature of their creation, users will not suffer the burns, scrapes and bladder infections that can come with wheelchair use.
One of the great features of this design, as you can see in the video, is that it’s fairly easy for a wheelchair user to mount the exoskeleton by him/herself.
After a football injury at the age of sixteen, Jamie Cap became paralyzed from the neck down. Now, thirty years later, he controls a shotgun attached to his wheelchair with a breathing tube. Getting legal permission was a substantial struggle, but now he’s been cleared by a court to start shooting:
Cap, 46, recently won a 2 1/2-year legal battle to allow him to use, with the help of a partner, a 12-gauge shotgun fitted with a battery-powered machine that is operated by a breathing tube.
He described firing that first shot last week with a combination of wistfulness and enthusiasm another person might use to describe rekindling a decades-old romance.
“I don’t know if there are words,” he said. “I’m so happy. When you find you can do something again after 30 years, you can’t put a price on that. Some people think it’s nothing, but try being paralyzed for 30 years and then come talk to me.”[...]
Cap might not have embarked on his bureaucratic odyssey had he not found Indiana-based Be Adaptive Equipment during a random Internet search. The company, which has made wheelchair mounts for shotguns since 2002, sells about 20 per year, according to owners Brian and Renee Kyler. Cap’s model cost about $1,600; a new 12-gauge shotgun starts at about $250.
For a quadriplegic, firing a shotgun requires help from a companion. In Cap’s case, a friend sets up the contraption, safety on, on Cap’s wheelchair and Cap aims the shotgun by moving the toggle switch with his mouth. Once his partner releases the safety, Cap fires by sipping on the breathing tube.
Link via Geekologie | Photo: AP
Sixteen-year old Daniel Pelletier is paralyzed from the waist down and has endured twenty-five surgeries during his recovery, but he doesn’t let that stop him from being an accomplished skateboarder. Pelletier hopes to get corporate sponsorship with this video. More videos at the link.
