Special exoskeleton to help paralysed patients walk : AIIMS Delhi
AIIMS Delhi and DRDO are collaborating on a project to develop a special exoskeleton for soldiers who have been injured in service and have lost their ability to walk or became paralysed. This exoskeleton will enable the injured soldiers to walk again.
Professor Bhavuk Garg, department of Orthopaedics AIIMS, said, “We have the best gait lab in India and right now, in the first phase, we are looking and collecting data about muscle activation patterns in people while walking, Once we have this data, we will feed it into a wearable robot kind of thing called an exoskeleton, which will enable paralytic people to walk.”
Professor Ravi Mittal, Head of Orthopaedic Department in AIIMS, said, “In our Gait Lab, we record the movements of knees, legs, etc.For this, we record them by placing many sensors and cameras on the body.
After which, all this data is collected and fed into the computer and then it is analysed. After this, every parameter is checked. It is studied. We find out how the person walks, how his legs rotate, what the speed is, and how much the gap is. All these things are being worked on very minutely.
Dr Mittal said that they study in detail a person’s walk. “What is the movement of the rest of his body? What is the effect on his shoulders and head? Every single thing is recorded in detail and from this, we find out how much difference there is between the gait of a person who is completely healthy and the gait of a person who is ill. Gait Lab is a study done on all these things, through which we can find out the data,” he said.
Source:TOI
