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Implant, Robotics Can Ease Paralysis From Spinal Cord Injuries
- March 14, 2025
- Dennis Thompson HealthDay Reporter
A muscle-stimulating implant combined with a robotic exoskeleton can help restore movement in people paralyzed by a spinal cord injury, a new study says.
The spinal cord implant delivers well-timed electrical pulses to muscles, stimulating natural muscle activity coordinated with supportive robotic movements, researchers reported March 12 in the journal Science Robotics.
Five people paralyzed by spinal cord injuries were able to walk or ride a stationary bike using the implant/robotics combination, researchers said.
Not only did participants regain the ability to engage muscles during robot-assisted therapy, but some enjoyed improved voluntary movement even after the stimulating implant was turned off, results show.
“The seamless integration of spinal cord stimulation with rehabilitation or recreational robotics will accelerate the deployment of this therapy into the standard of care and the community of people with spinal cord injury,” senior investigator Grégoire Courtine, a professor with École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, said in a news release.
Because it’s adaptable, rehabilitation professionals can incorporate this technology into their existing procedures and protocols worldwide, researchers explained. The study's lead authors are from the Swiss research labs, NeuroRestore and BioRob.
“We visited multiple rehabilitation centers to test our stimulation technology with the robotic systems they routinely use, and it was incredibly rewarding to witness their enthusiasm,” NeuroRestore's Nicolas Hankov and BioRob's Miroslav Caban said in a news release.
“Seeing firsthand how seamlessly our approach integrates with existing rehabilitation protocols reinforces its potential to transform care for people with spinal cord injury by providing a technological framework that is easy to adopt and deploy across multiple rehabilitation environments,” the researchers said.
Spinal cord stimulation strategies must be modulated to match a patient’s movement, making them difficult to integrate into robotic rehabilitation systems, researchers noted.
In this new method, a fully implanted spinal cord stimulation device delivers electrical impulses that mimic natural nerve signals.
The implant uses wireless sensors to detect limb movement and automatically adjust stimulation in real-time, ensuring that the stimulation is precisely timed to each phase of movement, researchers said.
Future clinical trials are needed to better understand how the stimulation/robotics combo restores mobility, and to establish the long-term benefits of this approach, researchers concluded.
More information
The International Federation of Robotics has more on robotics-assisted rehabilitation.
SOURCE: Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, news release, March 12, 2025
