Disabled walk after warfare research

Press, 21 March 1983, Page 17

Disabled walk after warfare research

AAP-Reuter Chicago Using technology from anti-submarine warfare research, American doctors have enabled five paraplegics to walk by using electrical signals from their upper back muscles. The research, reported in the journal of the American Medical Association, uses electrodes taped to the patient’s body and a tiny computer the size of a paperback book powered by small 1.5 volt batteries.

Daniel Graupe, a professor at. the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, and Dr Kate Kohn, head of the Rehabilitiation Department at Chicago’s Michael Reese

Medical Centre, have succeeded in getting five paraplegics — two in the United States and three in Israel — to walk again, the article said.

The origin of the project was Professor Graupe’s previous research for the United States Navy on retrieving and analysing weak radar and sonar signals. He solved that problem by filtering and amplifying the signals back to their original strength. The article reported Professor Graupe as saying that two skin electrodes were placed on the back of the patient just under the shoulder blades.

The electrodes picked up

weak signals from the movement of shoulder muscles which in turn were deciphered by the microcomputer. The computer triggered a muscle stimulator developed in conjunction with Alojz Kralj, a professor of engineering at the University of Ljubjana, Yugoslavia.

The stimulator was connected by wires to electrodes positioned over leg muscles. At present the discriminating computer and the electrostimulator are small enough to be carried in two shirt pockets. Eventually they could be welded into a unit no bigger than a pocket calculator, the article said.