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Four years after she was told she would never walk again, Amy Paradis takes her first steps with the help of a bionic exoskeleton
The first thing Amy Paradis did Monday morning was stand up. Then her lip began to tremble and she cried, and then her Mom and her trainer and everybody else in the room cried. They just broke right down. Sobbing. Heaving. Leaking out tears of crazy joy and wonder and relief and, well, wouldn’t you know it — simply standing on her own two feet and crying her eyes out wasn’t good enough for Amy Paradis.
So she took a step. Then another, and 336 in total over the next several hours, once the tears had dried, so that by the end of it all she was utterly, achingly, mentally and physically exhausted. Too wiped out to even lift her head off the table to speak with me, much, when I called her up in Windsor, N.S., at Footprints SCI-Recovery, the not-for-profit spinal cord recovery centre she co-founded and runs with her Mom, Marlene Belliveau.
All Amy Paradis could muster for me, which was plenty, thanks, was to whisper a few beautiful words about what taking her first steps in four years meant to someone who was in a horrible car wreck at age 16 and told by doctors she would never walk or have much of an independent life again.
“I don’t know how to put today into words,” she said. “I was stunned by it.”
Stunned because walking was not supposed to happen, though Ms. Paradis always promised everybody, including herself, that it would, and stunned because every step she took Monday belonged to her, and her hard work, though required a wee boost in the form of her brand new bionic suit. A Sci-fi gizmo originally dreamed up in a robotics lab at the University of California and one of only two of its kind in Canada and 75 worldwide. Yes. Amy Paradis, the bone-tired Atlantic Canadian, is a bona fide bionic woman.
Her mother explained.
On Boxing Day 2009, Amy went for a coffee with a friend. She told her Mom she would be back in 10 minutes. Thirty-five minutes later the hospital called. There had been an accident. A car had flipped. Amy’s upper spine was crushed.
“I remember standing in a hospital hallway in Halifax and the spinal surgeon telling me about how [physically] limited Amy’s life would be and I said, “No, you don’t know my daughter,” Ms. Belliveau says.
“And it wasn’t denial so much as, ‘We are going to make it.’ And I remember Amy lying in bed with tubes in her mouth and mouthing the words at me — ‘I am going to walk again, Mom’ — and she thought she was going to walk out of that hospital.”
“What they say at rehab is: ‘Here is your wheelchair, this is where you are going to spend the rest of your life, learn to use your upper body strength.’ What they should be saying is, ‘Here is your wheelchair, but concentrate on your body as a whole and strengthen it as a whole, because you never know.’ ”
You never know what technology is going to serve up next in a world of driverless cars, hand-held supercomputers and skyrocketing survival rates for diseases once thought incurable. You never know when a robotics team at Berkeley funded by the United States Defence Department will invent an exoskeleton suit to enable military personnel to heft hundreds of pounds of gear over long distances and then adapt their research to the civilian marketplace to get people in wheelchairs, who are never supposed to walk again, walking, standing, reaching out and hugging the people they love most, while looking them in the eye.
MARLENE BELLIVEAUA photo of Amy Paradis, received Tuesday, March 25, 2014, with her new $80,000 bionic suit that allows her to walk for the first time since she was paralyzed in a Boxing Day car accident.
The Ekso Bionics bionic suit weighs about 20 kilos, is powered by lithium batteries, has small motors at the hips and knees, plus body sensors and a small computer. The user straps it to their back and legs. Shifting their body weight, as a walker would — minus their actual flesh and blood legs — activates the suit and away they walk, for three hours per battery charge.
Of course, miracles don’t come cheap. The suit costs about $100,000, a price tag the entire community of Windsor has endeavoured to meet by holding fundraising breakfasts, potluck dinners, used clothing sales and more (and more ongoing). Ms. Paradis’ role, as the would-be bionic woman, was simple: get herself in crackerjack shape. Check.
The bionic woman, now that she is walking, won’t be sitting down anytime soon. She wants more. She wants to walk, all by herself, no suit. Then she wants to run. But first come the baby steps — 336 to be exact.
“Three hundred and thirty-six,” Marlene Belliveau says, her voice sounding happy and full and deep. “Three hundred and thirty-six.”
And Amy Paradis isn’t done yet.
National Post
Source: http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/03/25/four-years-after-she-was-told-she-would-never-walk-again-amy-paradis-takes-her-first-steps-with-the-help-of-a-bionic-exoskeleton/
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Founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov in February 2011 with the participation of leading Russian specialists in the field of neural interfaces, robotics, artificial organs and systems.
The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.
The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.
A large-scale transformation of humanity, comparable to some of the major spiritual and sci-tech revolutions in history, will require a new strategy. We believe this to be necessary to overcome existing crises, which threaten our planetary habitat and the continued existence of humanity as a species. With the 2045 Initiative, we hope to realize a new strategy for humanity's development, and in so doing, create a more productive, fulfilling, and satisfying future.
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2015-2020
The emergence and widespread use of affordable android "avatars" controlled by a "brain-computer" interface. Coupled with related technologies “avatars’ will give people a number of new features: ability to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, travel in extreme situations etc.
Avatar components will be used in medicine for the rehabilitation of fully or partially disabled patients giving them prosthetic limbs or recover lost senses.
2020-2025
Creation of an autonomous life-support system for the human brain linked to a robot, ‘avatar’, will save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged. Any patient with an intact brain will be able to return to a fully functioning bodily life. Such technologies will greatly enlarge the possibility of hybrid bio-electronic devices, thus creating a new IT revolution and will make all kinds of superimpositions of electronic and biological systems possible.
2030-2035
Creation of a computer model of the brain and human consciousness with the subsequent development of means to transfer individual consciousness onto an artificial carrier. This development will profoundly change the world, it will not only give everyone the possibility of cybernetic immortality but will also create a friendly artificial intelligence, expand human capabilities and provide opportunities for ordinary people to restore or modify their own brain multiple times. The final result at this stage can be a real revolution in the understanding of human nature that will completely change the human and technical prospects for humanity.
2045
This is the time when substance-independent minds will receive new bodies with capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans. A new era for humanity will arrive! Changes will occur in all spheres of human activity – energy generation, transportation, politics, medicine, psychology, sciences, and so on.
Today it is hard to imagine a future when bodies consisting of nanorobots will become affordable and capable of taking any form. It is also hard to imagine body holograms featuring controlled matter. One thing is clear however: humanity, for the first time in its history, will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species. Moreover, prerequisites for a large-scale expansion into outer space will be created as well.
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• International social movement
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