Sometimes a life-changing accident happens in the blink of an eye
SUTTER: I was riding my bicycle and was hit from behind by a car
MOORE: I was doing aluminum gutters and I got hit by a high tension wire 7,620 volts.
JOHNSON: I had a stroke last year – I just figured my life was just done.
Maria Sutter, Dale Moore and Deborah Johnson are patients at the VA hospital in Cleveland. Each suffered a brain or spinal cord injury that changed their lives forever – and all three are pushing the boundaries of their physical limitations through a new frontier of electronic medicine called Functional Electronic Stimulation. Hunter Pekham is the director of the functional electrical stimulation center in Cleveland.
PEKHAM: The research began four decades ago. Some visionaries at the NIH realized that technology and the neurosciences could be combined together to really impact people with disabilities.
The idea, Pekham says, was to stimulate damaged nerve fibers with electrical current as a means to help paralyzed people walk – and today several hundred patients are using it to do that …and more. After Dale Moore fell 30 feet from a ladder he didn’t think he’d ever walk again. But today he is showing off just how far he can go without a wheelchair.
MOORE: My record now I can walk about 114 feet – so it’s like night and day.
TRIOLO: He has electrodes at the base of his spine to stiffen his trunk – he has electrodes in his hip muscles, his hamstrings, the back of his thigh.
That’s Ron Triolo, one of the researchers who helps develop the implants.
TRIOLO: All those leads are channeled under the skin to where the implant is- so they all come to one location that receives information from the transmitter about what to fire when and how hard.
He points to a box about the size of a fanny pack that Moore wears around his waste and uses to control his implant.
TRIOLO: It’s all preprogrammed. So we tune the patterns of stimulation to Dale and how his muscles respond – so the timing is all set. He activates it and deactivates it. So he selects from a menu of options.
MOORE: They promised me soon I’d be golfing. (Laughter)
Moore supports himself with a walker and swings his legs from behind. A swing gait, it’s called in clinical terms. It’s not like what he used to be able to do, but the device gives him the strength to do simple tasks by himself.
MOORE: Now I can unbutton my shirt without falling over. I can comb my hair. I use this for driving. I use it when I play my guitar now – if you watch when I shut it off
When the machine goes off he Moore slumps forward in his chair. He reaches for his shirt button to show me the difference in his coordination.
MOORE: Now to try do something like this, I can only do it with one hand. If I was to do it with two hands I would keep on falling over. It keeps me solid so I can do things that I could never do before.
And for biomedical engineers like Hunter Pekham, that’s the whole point.
PEKHAM: Their story is I have regained control of my life, my independence. I’m able to do what I want to do to become an independent person. To become a taxpayer a worker, to live by myself and contribute to society.
And while the devices have come a long way, the ultimate achievement is when you look at a disabled person with this technology– and not even know they have it. Gretchen Cuda, 90.3.