People with lower body paralysis due to spinal cord injury have had some movement restored to their legs in the past. Though the strength and range of the leg motion has been limited, one major issue has been that actually getting the legs to move required the user to press buttons at the right time to activate the relevant muscles to flex.
Now a new system developed at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) and tested on paralyzed lab rats automatically triggers the legs to rise to the correct height and at the proper rate for the animals to walk forward. The researchers developed a closed-loop system that regularly refined and optimized the signals sent to the spinal cord below the site of the injury. This has allowed to create a predictive algorithm that moved the legs close to naturally where the rats wanted to step. The animals in the study were able to walk more than 1,000 steps each, managed to climb stairs, and walked with different gaits as they wanted at the time.
Flashback: Spinal Cord Electrical Stimulation Device Raising Hope for Paraplegics to Walk Again…
Study in Science Translational Medicine: Closed-loop neuromodulation of spinal sensorimotor circuits controls refined locomotion after complete spinal cord injury…
Project page: NEUWalk…
Press statement by EPFL: From Rats to Humans: Project NEUWalk Closer to Clinical Trials…