SUMMARY: The STIMO device rapidly restores motor functions in paralyzed individuals through electrical stimulation. A Swedish man using the device began to walk again after 5 years.
A revolutionary implant device known as STIMO that was designed by Swiss scientists has helped a man walk again. Michel Roccati became paralyzed after he severed his spinal chord in a motorcycle accident five years ago. The device is able to send electrode signals that emulate the brain communicating with the legs. The electrode device implanted directly into the area between the vertebrae and the spinal cord membrane, which receives currents from a pacemaker implanted under the skin of the abdomen.
Roccati is the first person with a severed spinal cord to walk again with the assistance of a walker. "I am free," Roccati told CNN. "I can walk wherever I want to."
Two other men paralyzed from the waist down participated in the STIMO clinical trial with Roccarti. They too were able to move their limbs within the week after their implant surgeries and re-learned to walk through rehabilitation. Led by Dr. Jocelyne Bloch of Lausanne University Hospital and Grégoire Courtine of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the results of the study were published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine.
This technology gives hop for more paralyzed people to be able to walk again. However, scientists are not readily calling it a miraculous discovery.
"It's not that it's a miracle right away, not by far," cautioned Gregoire Courtine, a neuroscientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology who led the research with Bloch. Patients are not fully recovered to the point where they can walk for long periods of time, but this is welcome progress in the scientific community.
Roccati is now "able to stand for two hours – he walks almost one kilometer without stopping".
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved a "breakthrough devices" designation to expedite the process to make the device commercially available CNN reports.