Helping patients regain their stride
Hospital remodels gym to accomodate the ZeroG, a machine that helps people learn to walk again
Robert Hayes caught a yellow ball with the ease of the basketball player he once was. His agility belied his 87 years and his condition. The Española resident was relearning how to walk recently at Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center’s rehabilitation center following a stroke that had left him on the ground outside his home — alone and unable to get up.
Hayes was the first person to test out Christus St. Vincent’s newly acquired The ZeroG Gait and Balance System. The machine is designed to help stroke and injury patients get their feet back under them more quickly than previous hospital technology allowed.
“Gosh, you are making me stretch,” Hayes told physical therapist Katie Titus as he plucked another toss out of the air while harnessed to the machine, which moved along a rail attached to the ceiling. The springy harness helped support his body weight while he walked along a path of painted footprints, with Titus in tow.
Titus asked him if he wanted to reverse direction.
“It doesn’t matter backwards or forwards,” Hayes said as he took another spin around the floor.
The hospital’s gym was remodeled for the machine, the ZeroG, a $200,00o apparatus made by the Ashburn, Va.-based company Aretech.
“It has dynamic body-weight support so it can give the patient a lift, some support when they are trying to get up to standing,” said Kathy Brady, a physical therapist with Aretech who was at the hospital for Hayes’ first steps, as well as the installation of the machine and staff training.
The ZeroG was invented and then launched in 2008 by Aretech CEO Joe Hidler, a biomedical engineer. It was used to help rehabilitate U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, who was shot and severely injured during a congressional baseball game in June in Washington, D.C.
“It emulates what your normal gait pattern is,” Brady said of the machine.
“So when you walk, you actually move up and down.” Two weeks ago, Hayes made a misstep. “I fell so hard, I thought I had paralyzed myself,” he said.
He had no function in his hands, legs and much of his torso. “It just felt as though I was never going to get up.” But he took to the machine. “First I had a little bit of doubt, and I said, ‘You can do it,’ and I done it,” Hayes said. “It took the body weight off my legs, and to tell you the truth, I had a lot of confidence in that machine.”
Titus, who got a full day of training on the ZeroG the same day Hayes “walked the walk,” said it took the hospital two and a half years to acquire the machine. She credited hospital rehabilitation director Russell Stowers with getting it done and Hayes with being a good patient.
“He just really excelled with every challenge we gave him,” she said.
A harness support system the rehab center had been using to help patients like Hayes get walking again restricted patient movement and required several therapists to operate, Titus said.
The ZeroG has several advantages over older, static systems.
“This system moves with you,” Brady said, “but it keeps you at a set body-weight support that the therapist thinks is safe for the patient.” It also can “get patients up sooner and you can challenge them sooner,” she said.
“Some patients, you can actually see the change in one session because they have the confidence that they are not going to fall. If they do lose their balance,” she said, “it’s going to catch them.”
For Hayes, a retired heavy equipment operator who now does a little farming, his optimism gave him a boost.
“What makes it easy for me is you want to do it, and you set your mind that you can do it,” he said.
His motivation for making progress was not only his own health but that of his wife of 67 years, Dolores, who was in a Los Alamos care facility and eager to see him again.
They had recently spoken, he said, and she told him, “I miss you a lot.”
Hayes was expected to leave the hospital this week.
He has an apt retort, he said, when someone gives him get-well wishes.
“I feel like I am well right now,” he said. “I’ve already got well.”