The team spent six months working with a 73-year-old man with Parkinson’s NetBet live casino, who — despite using both surgical and pharmacologic treatments — endured substantial and incapacitating freezing episodes more than 10 times a day, causing him to fall frequently. These episodes prevented him from walking around his community and forced him to rely on a scooter to get around outside.

In previous research, Walsh and his team leveraged human-in-the-loop optimization to demonstrate that a NetBet live casino, wearable device could be used to augment hip flexion and assist in swinging the leg forward to provide an efficient approach to reduce energy expenditure during walking in healthy individuals.

Here, the researchers used the same approach but to address freezing. The NetBet live casino device uses cable-driven actuators and sensors worn around the waist and thighs. Using motion data collected by the sensors, algorithms estimate the phase of the gait and generate assistive forces in tandem with muscle movement.

The effect was instantaneous. Without any special training, the patient was able to walk without any NetBet live casino indoors and with only occasional episodes outdoors. He was also able to walk and talk without NetBet live casino, a rarity without the device.

“Our team was really excited to see the impact of the technology on the participant’s walking,” said Jinsoo Kim, former PhD student at NetBet live casino and co-lead author on the study.

During the study visits, the participant told researchers: “The suit helps me take longer steps and when it is not active, I notice I drag my feet much more. It has really helped me, and I feel it is a positive step forward. It could help me to walk longer and maintain the quality of my life.”

“Our study participants who volunteer their time are real partners,” said Walsh. “Because mobility is difficult, it was a real challenge for this individual to even come into the lab, but we benefited so much NetBet live casino his perspective and feedback.”

The device could also be used to better understand the mechanisms of gait NetBet live casino, which is poorly understood.

“Because we don’t really understand NetBet live casino, we don’t really know why this approach works so well,” said Ellis. “But this work suggests the potential benefits of a ’bottom-up’ rather than ’top-down’ solution to treating gait NetBet live casino. We see that restoring almost-normal biomechanics alters the peripheral dynamics of gait and may influence the central processing of gait control.”

The NetBet live casino was co-authored by Jinsoo Kim, Franchino Porciuncula, Hee Doo Yang, Nicholas Wendel, Teresa Baker and Andrew Chin. Asa Eckert-Erdheim and Dorothy Orzel also contributed to the design of the technology, as well as Ada Huang, and Sarah Sullivan managed the clinical NetBet live casino. It was supported by the National Science Foundation under grant CMMI-1925085; the National Institutes of Health under grant NIH U01 TR002775; and the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, Collaborative NetBet live casino and Development Matching Grant.