HAL Hybrid Robotic Exoskeleton: Robot suit helps paraplegic patients

For most paraplegic patients, being able to walk again remains a dream.

The HAL robot suit can help them regain a certain degree of mobility and activity.

An expert team at the Centre for Neurorobotic Movement Training (ZNB) in Bochum has been testing the exoskeleton that was originally developed in Japan since 2011. With excellent results.

Paraplegia is essentially the result of damaged nerve structures in the spine.

To perform a movement, the brain sends out a signal via the spinal cord and its surrounding nerves to a muscle – e.g.one in the arm or in the leg.

Due to his injury, a paraplegic patient's muscles operate with weakened signals.

As a result, the signal does not arrive in the leg or in the arm.

This is where the HAL robot suit comes into play: it picks up the weakened signals through sensors that are attached to the patient's skin and sets the motors in the pelvic and knee-joint regions in motion.

Thus, HAL takes over locomotion on the patient's behalf by connecting directly to the patient's nervous system.

"This is how we wish to activate and foster the residual function of the muscles and, ultimately, to help the patients attain better activity levels," explains Professor Schild Hauer, Medical Director at the university hospital Berufsgenossenschaftliches Universitätsklinikum Bergmannsheil.

The expert team uses the clinical trials at the ZNB to determine, among other things, how much training is required in the best possible scenario and how long the training effects will or will not last.

They have implemented a three-month training cycle, with five sessions per week.

With excellent results: "Our patients attain activity levels which improve their ability to navigate around their everyday life and their surroundings."

"Thus, they continue to train their movement routine every day," explains Professor Schildhauer.

A patient who had been permanently confined to a wheelchair, for example, will be able to walk short distances with the aid of a walking frame after a three-month training period.

In Germany, Bergmannsheil is the only hospital where the robot suit is being tested. In Japan, similar suits are being utilised in some 200 geriatric rehab centres.

The long-term objective is to launch HAL in the German market so that it can be used as a therapy instrument to help as many people as possible.

However, insurance companies will not incorporate the therapy into their clearing system until well-founded data are available, which will only be the case once further trials have been conducted.

Disabled Patients Thinking With Robots

Researchers have invented a new, noninvasive method for recording patterns of brain activity and using them to steer a robot.

Scientists hope the technology will give "locked in" patients—those too disabled to communicate with the outside world—the ability to interact with others and even give the illusion of being physically present, or "telepresent," with friends and family.

Previous brain-machine interface systems have made it possible for people to control robots, cursors, or prosthetics with conscious thought, but they often take a lot of effort and concentration, says José del R. Millán, a biomedical engineer at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland who develops brain-machine interface systems that don't need to be implanted into the brain.

Millán's goal is to make control as easy as driving a car on a highway. A partially autonomous robot would allow a user to stop concentrating on tasks that he or she would normally do subconsciously, such as following a person or avoiding running into walls. But if the robot encounters an unexpected event and needs to make a split-second decision, the user's thoughts can override the robot's artificial intelligence.

To test their technology, Millán and colleagues created a telepresent robot by modifying a commercially available bot called Robotino. The robot looks a bit like a platform on three wheels, and it can avoid obstacles on its own using infrared sensors.

On top of the robot, the researchers placed a laptop running Skype, a voice and video Internet chat system, over a wireless Internet connection. This allowed the human controller to see where the robot was going, and, because the laptop also showed a video of the user, it allowed others to interact with the user as though the user were actually there.

The user also wore a cap of tiny electroencephalogram (EEG) electrodes, which measured his or her brain activity. This system translates the EEG signals into navigation instructions and transmits them in real time to the robot.

EEG patterns for movement and navigation are similar from person to person, and Millán's group has previously demonstrated that after a little practice, a healthy person can share control with the robot with very little effort. But would a bed-bound patient, who hasn't used his limbs for years, have the same pattern of brain waves and be able to control robots as effectively?

The researchers recruited two patients whose lower bodies were paralyzed and who had been bed bound for 6 or 7 years.

The researchers trained the patients to control the robot for 1 hour per week for 6 weeks. With the instructions being transmitted over a wireless connection, the patients didn't need to leave the hospital and were able to control the robot in Millán's lab at EPFL, 100 kilometers away.

At the end of the training period, the researchers instructed the subjects to drive the robot to various targets, such as furniture, people, and small objects, around the lab for 12 minutes.

The disabled patients performed just as well as healthy subjects, Millán and colleagues report this week at the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society conference in Boston.

When the researchers turned the shared control off, forcing the subjects to constantly concentrate on controlling the robot, the subjects took considerably longer to navigate the maze than when they shared control.

Millán says he wasn't terribly surprised that disabled people could control the robot, as previous research using brain scans has shown that even patients who have been paralyzed since birth can still imagine moving their limbs. But he was surprised how fast they learned.

He is now hoping to involve more bed-bound patients, including locked-in patients in the study. He also sees future applications for the shared control brain-machine interface, such as modifying it to let a user control a prosthetic limb or a wheelchair. And the researchers may eventually add an arm to the current telepresent robot to allow it to grasp objects.

Artificial Kidney Implant good news for patients

About 85,000 people need kidney transplants each year, but fewer than 20,000 kidneys are available. To survive, people with chronic kidney disease must undergo dialysis for 4 hours at a time, multiple times each week.

UCSF Professor of Bioengineering, Shuvo Roy, PhD, is leading a team of researchers to develop an implantable artificial kidney that could make dialysis a thing of the past.

I'm smiling, so I know you're happy

I'm smiling, so I know you're happy - New Scientist

TO FULLY understand what emotion a person is experiencing, it may help to be able to imitate their facial expressions.

So says Luigi Trojano of the Second University of Naples, Italy, after working with patients with locked-in syndrome, who are conscious but unable to move any part of their body except their eyes, which they use to communicate. He discovered that such people often fail to identify specific emotions in others.

Trojano's team asked seven locked-in people and 20 healthy controls to view and respond to pictures of famous actors portraying six basic emotions, such as happiness or fear. When asked to identify each emotion, the locked-in patients were wrong 57 per cent of the times they viewed fear.

They were also more likely than controls to misidentify anger, sadness and disgust (The Journal of Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.6300-09.2010).

Drug that could reverse Alzheimer’s to be tested on patients

A new drug with the potential to halt or even reverse Alzheimer’s disease is expected to be tested in patients later this year, researchers have revealed.

The drug, which tackles a key factor in the development of the disease, is expected to enter the crucial Phase 3 trial – the last stage before seeking regulatory approval – in the latter half of 2010, according to its inventor, Aberdeen University’s Professor Claude Wischik.

Earlier clinical trials of the drug – called remberTM – showed that it could slow progression of Alzheimer’s disease by 84 per cent over 12 months. Furthermore, the effect was sustained over two years. When the results were reported at a conference in Chicago in 2008, they caused worldwide excitement and optimism that, at last, an effective treatment for dementia could be in the pipeline.

But before the drug could move to Phase 3 trials – which will compare it against placebo in larger numbers of patients – millions of dollars in funding have to be raised and regulatory obstacles overcome.

Prof Wischik is optimistic that that ongoing fundraising will permit the Phase 3 trial to begin this year. “This will be a large-scale, international study using around 50 centres,” he said. “We’re moving on substantially from the Phase 2 trial – we’ve beefed up our management team and have really moved on to another level.

“We’re breaking new ground here – the Phase 2 trial provided the first evidence that a drug of this type could arrest progression of the disease, but we believe it can go further than that and perhaps reverse the disease, at least at its early stages.”

The drug acts on the “tangles” which are found in the brains of people with the disease, and which were first described by Alois Alzheimer in 1907. Around two decades ago, Prof Wischik discovered that these tangles were made up of a build up of tau protein, which destroys the brain cells responsible for memory, before going on to kill neurons elsewhere in the brain.

A university spin-out company, TauRx Therapeutics, based in Singapore, developed a novel treatment from a chemical already used in other conditions, which appears to ‘dissolve’ the tangles and halt cognitive decline – the Holy Grail in dementia treatment.

The Phase 2 trial – intended to reveal side-effects as well as efficacy – revealed that the tested form of the chemical worked well at the low and moderate doses, backing the theory that it could arrest the progression of the disease.

It did not work at the highest dose tested due to a problem with the formulation which affected the release of the drug in its active form and this had an impact both on the efficacy and side-effects and limiting the benefit that can be achieved with the older form of the chemical.

Read the full article here at Caledonian Mercury .....

Health - Canadian research alters view of breast tumours

CBC News - Health - B.C. research alters view of breast tumours

Not all cells in a breast cancer tumour contain the same mutations, researchers in British Columbia have found.

The finding that changes occur in tumours over time could change how scientists think about developing new breast cancer drugs and deciding which patients would benefit most from treatments.

In Wednesday's issue of the journal Nature, Samuel Aparicio and his colleagues at the BC Cancer Agency charted the genetic mutations that occurred in the 3 billion letters of the DNA sequence from an estrogen-receptor-alpha-positive breast tumour.

"The impact is going to be in the way that cancer researchers look at developing therapies and applying therapies in the short term," said Aparicio, chair of breast cancer research at the BC Cancer Agency and Canada research chair in molecular oncology.

"Over the long term, we hope that being able to decode the sequence of tumours on a routine basis will eventually lead us to being able to better predict which combinations of medicines to use when treating a cancer. We're not quite at that point yet."

The team found 32 mutations after it had spread, nine years after the original biopsy of the lobular breast cancer, which accounts for eight to 15 per cent of all breast cancers, Aparicio said.


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Lose That Weight Now! You know you want to.

Here is some good advice from another doctor who is on the cutting edge in the treatment of obesity, Dr Phil.

He talks to patients about how their weight is contributing to medical problems and encourages them to aim for a modest weight loss by making simple changes such as cutting out fruit juices and Cola or other high-calorie beverages and walking in five- to 10-minute increments several times a day. "I encourage patients to lose 5% to 10%, see where they are and then try for another 5% to 10%," he says.

He and his staff, which includes other physicians, dietitians and behavioural psychologists, insist that patients keep good food journals, which the health professionals review. "A lot of time they aren't eating the wrong foods, but they are just eating too much," he says.

Most 90% of people can lose weight with diet, exercise and behaviour modification. The longer people keep food logs, the better they do, he says. When people get off track, it's because they are often no longer keeping food journals and they're not being weighed weekly.

He believes primary-care doctors could make great strides in helping patients lose weight by inviting them to come into the office every week to be weighed: "That helps keep them focussed and accountable."

Achieving steady weight loss is not easy, because it means a change in your lifestyle or behaviour and most patients know it, he says. "Despite some patients being prompted and guided to do all the right things, their minds are completely resistant to the necessary behavioural change required, and therefore they experience less or no weight loss."

H1N1 Swine Flu Vaccine - Human Trials start in Australia

The number of people calling in sick with swine flu symptoms has tripled in a week, with 130,000 people staying away from work.

Worldwide, 700 people have died!

News of the increase in absenteeism came as the British death toll from the virus rose to 31, with a 51-year-old woman from Wiltshire and the 15-year-old from Glasgow the latest victims.

Greatest Challenge to NHS
Sir Liam Donaldson, the chief medical officer, yesterday warned that swine flu “almost certainly” posed the biggest challenge to the NHS for a generation. Fears of swine flu crisis grow as six-year-old girl and doctor dieAlmost 130,000 people stayed off work with flu, coughs and colds on July 14, up from 45,000 a week before, according to FirstCare, an absence management company.

Absentees triple
While absences tripled, the number of people who have actually contracted the virus is thought to have only doubled over the same period, highlighting how fear of infection is damaging business.

Septic Shock
Meanwhile, it has emerged that Chloe Buckley, the girl thought to have been the first healthy young victim of swine flu, died from septic shock after a bout of tonsillitis, a post mortem examination indicated. The death of Chloe, six, from West Drayton, west London, alarmed parents of young children.

Dr Simon Tanner, London’s regional director of public health, said it was impossible “to say to what degree swine flu contributed to her death”.

Andrew McCombe, a leading surgeon, said it was rare for a child to die from septic shock after contracting tonsillitis. “Normally septic shock affects old people,” he said.

Human Vaccine Trials to Begin
Human trials of a vaccine to protect against the H1N1 swine flu virus have begun in Australia.
Vaxine and CSL have both started injecting human volunteers this week, but it will be at least six weeks before the initial results are known.

Morbidity rate increases
The overall morbidity figure is likely to climb on Thursday when the Department of Health gives its weekly update. Worldwide, more than 700 people have died.

What's behind the mask?

Is this the front or the back of the mask? Are you looking out or in? New research claims that people with schizophrenia will know (Image: bluegum/stock.xchng)