Deans' stroke musings: DARPA is funding the development of a soft, fabric-based exoskeleton

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Thursday, April 2, 2015

DARPA is funding the development of a soft, fabric-based exoskeleton

This would make so much sense for helping survivors. But unless you start screaming about it it will never get into any rehabilitation hospital.

DARPA is funding the development of a soft, fabric-based exoskeleton

When someone says "exoskeleton," it's easy to imagine a clunky contraption made of metal, like the one we typically see in the news courtesy of various research groups, or in movies like Edge of Tomorrow. The exoskeleton that Harvard's Wyss Institute is developing, though, doesn't look like it was torn off a robot: it's called the Soft Exosuit, and as its name implies, it's lightweight and made of fabric. Wyss has actually been working on the Soft Exosuit for years, but now DARPA has granted it a $2.9 million funding under its Warrior Web program to further its development. Its current iteration is really more like smart clothing that can be worn like pants, designed to mimic how leg muscles and tendons move and to support the users' joints as they walk. That's made possible thanks to the strategically placed straps around the legs that contain flexible sensors -- all controlled by a low-power microprocessor.
DARPA's Warrior Web program seeks new technologies to prevent injuries in soldiers, so it's safe to say that the Soft Exosuit will be used by the military when it's ready. Its creators believe that it could also be used by healthy, ordinary people, though, to lengthen the distance they can travel by foot without being consumed by fatigue. Of course, the team also plans to collaborate with clinical partners in order to develop a medical version for patients with limited mobility. Now we're just waiting for the Wyss researchers to team up with the TitanArm inventors at UPenn for the ultimate full-body suit.