Meet Roboprop
Paralysed rugby player walks with hi-tech skeleton his brain controls
With dozens of electrodes, straps and tubes, the contraption wrapped around rob Camm looks like a particularly uncomfortable straitjacket.
The robotic skeleton, however, is giving him the gift of movement and freedom – helped with the power of his mind.
Former rugby player Mr Camm, 21, was left paralysed from the neck down in a car crash two years ago, just a week before he was due to start university.
he spent months in hospital, and was confined to a wheelchair and reliant on a ventilator to help him breathe. he still needs the ventilator but he has taken his first steps since the accident with the help of the robotic exoskeleton, known as rex. Physiotherapists strapped him into the device, which uses 79 electrodes attached his head to read brain signals and convert them into movement.
Mr Camm, of Berkeley, Gloucestershire, said: ‘It is amazing to be thinking about doing something, and then actually doing it.
‘For me just walking itself is unusual and then controlling the walking myself as well – I don’t know how to describe it to be honest.
‘The strange thing is looking down at your toes and seeing them moving. When you haven’t been doing that for quite a while, it’s just a strange experience.’
he added: ‘What they wanted me to do first was to imagine rex walking, and imagine the process that it goes through. So, left leg up, left leg forward…and so on. I have no idea how it works at all. People that are a lot more clever than me have worked that out.’
Mr Camm had just played his final rugby match for his local team, Dursley rFC, when he was involved in the crash in September 2013. he was days away from starting training at York university, where he was due to study politics, philosophy and economics.
The accident left him paralysed from the neck down, and he spent 96 days on his back at the intensive care unit at Frenchay hospital in Bristol. he was then transferred to a specialist unit in Salisbury and within weeks was able to sit up in a wheelchair for 15 minutes a day. eventually he was allowed home, and in April this year started working with experts at rex Bionics in the uK and rome to try out their ‘exoskeleton’.
The machine sees a cap placed on Mr Cam’s head, which is covered in the electrodes filled with ultrasound gel. Mr Camm then thinks about the process of walking and the cap picks up signals from his brain. As he thinks ‘ walking thoughts’, the cap picks up the signals and relays them to a computer in the exoskeleton, which is attached to his torso and legs.
It decodes the signals and sends them to the legs of the machine – which is powered by hydraulics – and steps forward as he thinks about making the movement. The machine, one of just 17 in the world, is kept at a specialist unit in Northampton which Mr Camm can visit. It is hoped that as the technology advances, one day the machine will be more reliable, and even controlled through eye movements and under-skin implants.
The robotic suit – which costs £95,000 – was made by rex Bionics, which was started around ten years ago by two British engineers who had emigrated to New Zealand. The company was bought in 2014 by a British firm and employs 40 staff.