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Segway helps disabled man more than wheelchair
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 My patient was bleeding
profusely from the esophagus, and as a first-year gastroenterology
fellow, I had been called in to the UCSF intensive care unit to stop
it. We were successful. The next morning, Jan. 4, 2003, I went out for
a bike ride - but never made it home.
In a freak accident, I was thrown headfirst over my handlebars and
paralyzed from the shoulders down. At San Francisco General, my pulse
and blood pressure crashed. The trauma team, my own colleagues,
administered life-saving dopamine and rushed me to the ICU. I spent
five days there, barely able to breathe, staring at my motionless
limbs, powerless to will them to move.
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Wii Gets Physical With Rehab Therapy
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 A medical rehabilitation hospital in Columbus Ohio is using the
Nintendo Wii as physical therapy to help patients recover from injuries
like stroke, spinal cord trauma, and damage to the brain.
Finding a console this holiday season will undoubtedly be difficult for
many would-be Wii owners. Some want it to play with their families
while others just want to bowl their hearts out on their own. In the
case of 51-year old Franklin Perry, his desire to score a Wii this
Christmas stems from his recent habitual use—that is, using it to
help recover from a recent stroke.
That’s right, Perry is
one of many patients at the Ohio State University Medical
Center’s Dodd Hall Rehabilitation Hospital that uses the Nintendo
Wii as a form of therapy.
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2 CREATE ONLINE SITE DEDICATED TO TRANSFORMING LIVES
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 Dr Glen House knows the difficulty of re-connecting with the world
after a devas-tating injury, of navi-gating life with a disability.
House is a quadri-plegic; a ski acci-dent at age 20 cost him the
use of his legs and limited the dexterity in his hands. As medical
director of the Center for Neuro and Trauma Rehabilitation at Penrose
Hospital, he helps patients in similar situations piece their lives
back together as they strive for some degree of independence.
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Rehab Robot Does Heavy Lifting
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 Over the past few months, the School of Human Kinetics’ Tania
Lam has been keeping close company with the Lokomat®, one of only
two rehab robots in Canada.
The Lokomat, a
$300,000, robotic gait device, uses cutting-edge Swiss technology for
body weight-supported treadmill training (BWSTT), a promising treatment
strategy following neurological injury.
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'Smart' prosthetics: restoring independence to people with disabilities
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People with paralysis can stand and move without a wheelchair. They can
operate computers to read email and play video games. Brown University
neuroscientist John Donoghue said these recent achievements are
previews of a major promise of neurotechnology – restoring
movement control and communication to people immobilized by injury or
disease.
“We’re at the dawn of a new age of neurotechnology,”
Donoghue said. “Thanks to advances in biology, medicine, computer
science and engineering, we can repair the human nervous system –
not with tissue but with technology.
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New Israeli patent gets a leg up
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 For many stroke victims, one of the most debilitating results of their condition is the paralysis of a limb.
For the thousands of Americans who have difficulty walking due to a paralyzed foot, an Israeli company may have the answer to restore their former gait.
Central nervous system injuries often cause a gait disorder called 'Foot Drop' which is the inability to raise the foot while walking and therefore results in dragging of the foot, instability, and increased effort as they move. The NESS L300 is an advanced system designed to improve gait in people suffering from foot drop as a result of a central nervous system injury or disease.
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Brain-to-comp links yield neurotherapies
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Technology that can establish a direct connection between human thought and computer operations has been a visionary proposition for decades. Now, thanks to the entrepreneurial efforts of some longtime researchers in the field, techniques that might help restore neurologically-impaired people's command over their environment are nearing commercialization. One effort is offering medical researchers a new window into the brain, allowing them to acquire specific neural activity with electronic precision so that the relation between thought and motor action in the body can be decoded. The technology is being marketed as the Braingate neural contact system by Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems Inc. But company founder John Donoghue, chairman of the Department of Neuroscience at Brown University, is looking well beyond diagnostics, positioning the company for a frontal attack on one of the most intractable problems in medicine: restoring function to people with damaged nervous systems.
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A father apart with lots of heart
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Ten years with Lou Gehrig's Disease - By ALBERTA STOJKOVIC For The Marion Star What does a 43-year-old father do when he is told he has just three to five years to live? For Brian Vail of Mount Gilead, the answer has been to live for 10 years with the debilitating Lou Gehrig's Disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, well beyond the "norm" for his affliction.
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Now, Dirty Harry Is Gunning for the ADA
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ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGY - JOHN M. WILLIAMS - MAY 10, 2000
But Clint Eastwood and other critics should hold their fire until they get the facts straight
I'll apologize to no one for the Americans with Disabilities Act. It's one of the greatest laws ever passed. The ADA covers all races, both genders -- all working-age people with disabilities.
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'BrainGate' Brain-Machine-Interface takes shape
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An implantable, brain-computer interface the size of an aspirin has been clinically tested on humans by American company Cyberkinetics. The 'BrainGate' device can provide paralysed or motor-impaired patients a mode of communication through the translation of thought into direct computer control. The technology driving this breakthrough in the Brain-Machine-Interface field has a myriad of potential applications, including the development of human augmentation for military and commercial purposes.
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