Paraplegia is due to a provocative spinal cord injury partial or complete paralysis of both lower limbs or even the trunk. This difficult disease is all the more difficult to treat. But a team of researchers who used virtual reality combined with a human / machine interface have succeeded in restoring a real capacity of movement to these patients.
Developed by the neuroscience department of la Duke l'University en Caroline du nord, USA, this method stimulates the brain of patients via virtual reality by sending a message to their brains. Thus, the patient sees the walking movement through the eyes of an avatar, this virtual simulation produces stimuli to the brain who can thus calculate this simulated operating state, then the patient can thus send his virtual stimuli in mechanical calculations to an exoskeleton. All this allows to create a base of mechanical controls feeding the interface of the exoskeleton.
In addition, the researchers discovered that this care did not stop there, since after 7 years of testing, they understood that this work really made it possible to do regain the lost functions of the nervous system. A unique feat in a field that the scientific community has difficulty in combating.
Doctor Miguel Nicolelis announces:
Many patients have passed, after this treatment, from total paralysis to partial paralysis, a pregnant woman could even feel her child in her womb but also contractions, a man is now able to drive and sit. Many patients also had the chance to see control over their bladder or bowel increase, avoiding the most frustrating setbacks of paraplegia.
It is good to see that virtual reality today can forever change the lives of people with severe suffering, virtual reality is definitely needed as a major advance of our time and we still want to discover the new benefits that it could bring apart from the treatment of paraplegia.
