"BIO" - BIOTECHNOLOGY AND BIOMEDICAL INNOVATIONS
		INFO BIO NANO MACRO ENVIRO Biotechnology at MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Bio-Instrumentation Laboratory Biological Engineering Division Biotechnology Process Engineering Center Center for Biological and Computational Learning Center for Biomedical Engineering Harvard-MIT Division of Health Science and Technology McGovern Institute for Brain Research Whitehead Institute			POWERED JOINT BRACES TO HELP THE MOBILITY IMPAIRED Woodie Flowers Department of Mechanical Engineering Ten million of the 21 million Americans with disabilities have difficulty lifting a light object or need help with activities of daily living. Twenty percent of the $200 billion that the disabled spend on physical therapy is paid for out of pocket. These statistics point to a need for affordable devices that both augment strength and hasten rehabilitation. This project aims to create an active joint brace: a wearable, unencumbering exoskeleton that augments physical capability by working in tandem with existing musculature. It will allow people who have suffered from neurological trauma — due to spinal cord injury or stroke, for instance — to rebuild strength, rehabilitate, and gain independence. Funds from a prior Deshpande Center Ignition Grant helped create a working prototype that has shown initial promise in enabling quadriplegics to move their arms and is currently engaged in an outpatient clinical study with stroke patients. Existing technology that has dominated the robotic rehabilitation market — complex, expensive and unreliable — targets only a few customers. The joint brace, on the other hand, is cost-effective, easily controlled by the user and could afford self-driven therapy for a large patient population.
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