EMMT

Jake Javier’s EMMT, Unfortunately I can’t tell anyone what that stands for until a patent application is secured. Jake is a student at Cal Poly and is wheelchair bound.  He was about to play football there as a freshman when he had a spinal cord injury.  After rehab he chose BioMedical Engineering as a career. 

 He was helping me on one of my Open Source Mobility projects and I really wanted to make a device for him.  I was thinking of a walking frame, then started thinking about how he responded in the LiftWalker.  He was getting some activity in his thighs but he had no awareness of it.  I thought it might be helpful to make a gizmo to tell him by  variable audio signals what his muscle activity was.  But Jake thought of something better.  (Again I have to edit out the details.  Suffice it to say that it is a very novel method of initiating movement in paralyzed limbs, and, hopefully, promoting neuroplastic reorganization.) Well, his idea is perfectly brilliant and we’ve been working on it about a year and proved it is possible (of course!).  This year it’s his senior project at Cal Poly and the subject of another student’s Master’s thesis.

More later!!!

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