Ok, this is the best thing I have seen in a long time and I NEVER would have believed it just a few years ago!
Mize, you are fucking amazing!
[yt]
Mize, you are fucking amazing!
[yt]
Is that actual Mize from here?
Good stuff Mize! Does it have WiFi?
Whatever you do, don't let your cat get near it...Oh no please no Digi will be tempted to remote it
Hm, for someone with a severed spinal cord, I think we'd prefer a rigid chassis on the whole - say like, that Terminatrix model from T3. Maybe we'd drop the built-in flame thrower and saw from the design blueprints though...it'll take a while to hit T-1000 level
So the exoskeleton and the therapist are doing the vast majority of the work as far as legs go. The big advantage for me is that, when I do assisted walking with a walker I put an enormous percentage of my weight through my hands because I can't feel my legs, but, in the Rewalk, you cannot lean over enough to do that or it will just stop so I'm putting easily 90% of my weight through my legs which can help fight osteoporosis.
Unfortunately they cost $100k and getting insurance to help is a long shot.
What does the ReWalk use to control the actuators? Is it manually controlled through the crutches?
Is the noise we hear in the video from the motors that loud or are the smartphone's microphones exaggerating it a bit?
You seem to be struggling with balance despite the apparently very safe support from 2 crutches and 2 legs. Do you feel there's a lack of "safe balance" in your abdominal region?
Sorry if the questions seem weird, but this is my actual line of work in research
I have to say you had me fooled pretty well! It looked to me like you had at least some control over your abs.I'm a T3 complete paraplegic which means I have no volitional control or sensation below my nipple line. So, yeah, balance is a big issue. No abs, no lower back, no intercostals, etc.
So it's kickstarted through manual activation and then it uses angular distance combinations in the knee and hip joints of the exoskeleton?The exo is activated for each step my successfully shifting one's weight far enough to the stance side (and that side hip slightly forward) that the swing foot (rear most) is unweighted. You must also do this shift within a time window while not leaning too far forward. The initial activation is through a watch-like controller that another PT is holding.
That's what I thought :/Finally, the motors are loud. The phone microphone might be exaggerating it a little, but they're loud.
Have you seen Ekso and REX?Unfortunately they cost $100k and getting insurance to help is a long shot.
But maybe they can be bouncy?Pneumatics is probably too bouncy for use in human applications I would think, unless fantastic leaps and bounds have somehow been made that I'm completely unaware of.
Is that part of the reason behind the success of prosthetic blades?But maybe they can be bouncy?
Skeletal Muscle behavior is bouncy, and no one really needs the 0.5º precision of the servo motors being used in these solutions. The point is to allow a gait cycle to be formed, not to get paraplegics to do ballet dancing.
.
Yes, I suppose you're right, but we have the ability to essentially pre-tense our muscles depending on the situation so we don't literally bounce when we move... Unless the control mechanism of a pneumatic exoskeleton gains knowledge of our intended movements (like, brain interface-style), it would be difficult for it to perform in a similar way I would think. Maybe if we could give it a form of trainable 'muscle memory', allowing it to recognize patterns in our movements and adjust accordingly. AI for exoskeletons essentially, I suppose you could call it.But maybe they can be bouncy?
Skeletal Muscle behavior is bouncy
Just today in fact I read an article in a newspaper about a guy who lost both legs and an arm in a collision with a train who is starting up his own prosthetics company because the current market-dominating manufacturers weren't offering good products. His goal was to make much cheaper and better offerings; I took it as he wanted to be a 'market disrupting' newcomer in the artificial limbs business. Granted, not exoskeletons - yet. Maybe some day, if he gets his business off the ground...I really think - and hope - these devices will start advancing really fast within the next 5 years or so.