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Afterwards decades of being relegated to science fiction, robotic exoskeletons have made amazing strides in just the past few years. This week, the FDA canonical a lightweight robotic exoskeleton, called the Indego. While the Indego isn't the beginning of its kind, it punches above its weight in terms of what it can offer. It's lighter — almost twenty pounds lighter — than either of its prior-art fellows, the ReWalk or the Phoenix.

Vanderbilt professor of engineering science Michael Goldfarb, who designed and built the device, meant the Indego to be hands useful to a wide range of people. One of his design goals was that the exoskeleton should give users the maximum possible degree of personal freedom. It had to exist hands put on and taken off from a wheelchair. It'south got a control scheme a lot like a Segway. Users make the exoskeleton move by leaning from the body — lean forward and it takes a step, lean back for a few moments and it volition sit downwardly. "You can think of our exoskeleton as a Segway with legs," Goldfarb even said in a argument.

Some other major divergence between the Indego and its competitors is that it uses a rehabilitation engineering called functional electrical stimulation (FES), which delivers targeted electricity through the pare sort of similar a TENS unit. FES itself is a well-established treatment for spinal cord injuries and other neuromuscular problems — the Christopher Reeve Foundation fifty-fifty mentions FES past proper name — but while this specific application of FES shows a lot of hope, it may or may not actually be therapeutically useful.

To that finish, the DOD is interested enough in Goldfarb's work that they threw down greenbacks to put him at the head of a 4-yr written report of the benefits of such exoskeletons for people with spinal cord injuries. They'll be working with the Mayo Dispensary, among others, to study the impact of exoskeletons on the lives of actual humans, not just for military applications. The study will involve 24 participants, and it's too intended to determine whether regular utilise of the Indego will help with the host of secondary medical problems that being wheelchair-bound tin can cause, including only not limited to pressure sores, blood clots, cardiovascular and respiratory problems, and chronic pain.

Right at present the sticker price is supposed to be a cool $80,000, which leaves the Indego far out of achieve for most. But that story isn't over. The next pace, co-ordinate to the original Vanderbilt press release, is to become the Indego a Medicare/Medicaid "charge per unit code," which would percolate down to private health insurers and ensure that patients could be reimbursed for up to 80% of the cost of a given piece of medical equipment. While the Indego has been available in Europe since final twelvemonth, Parker Hannafin, the manufacturer, yet has to demonstrate to the FDA that the device has the secondary medical benefits it claims. Assuming their success, the company plans a commercial stateside launch for Indego in the well-nigh future.