Dan Bacher’s job is all about the not-so-simple connection between thinking and doing.
Bacher is a 29-year-old engineer who has been working with BrainGate, a collaboration between Brown University and other academic institutions, to pioneer an experimental brain implant that helps people with severe, paralyzing brain injuries use computers to regain movement and task completion. Bacher has been working with BrainGate patient Cathy Hutchinson, who suffered a brain stem stroke in 1996 that left her mostly motionless but with an alert mind. An optimistic sticker on her wheelchair reads “My legs don’t work, but my brain does.” Bacher and BrainGate have implanted a computer chip in her brain that helps her move a robotic arm by thinking about doing so and perform tasks such as picking up a cup of coffee and drinking it through a straw. Though this technology proves immensely helpful, Hutchinson still struggles with something more basic — communication.
Her $10,000 communications device malfunctions often and is time consuming to use. Bacher said watching and seeing this struggle is what inspired him to create a nonprofit called SpeakYourMind Foundation Inc. Bacher is using SpeakYourMind to find low-cost alternatives to expensive communications technology. He just installed an $800 Windows tablet on her wheel chair with new communications software that uses her slight head movements along with algorithms to spell out words on the screen or send emails. Though the software is still new, it’s a step up from Hutchinson’s current form of communication. Before Bacher left Hutchinson’s home after installing the new tablet, it took her 45 minutes to write this short message to The Providence Journal: “I’m excited about the future of sym,” she wrote, using sym as the acronym for SpeakYourMind. “I have faith in sym and I’m very optimistic about the help it will bring to so many.”
MORE: How Crowdsourcing Medical Bills Can Usher in a New Era of Health Care Transparency
Tag: disabilities
When This Armless Paralympian Couldn’t Feed His Family, He Took Up a Hobby That Changed His Life
Matt Stutzman was born without his arms, but like most kids growing up in rural Fairfield, Iowa, he learned to drive early, and he told Tom McGhee of the Denver Post, “The only accident I was in was when they hit me because they were staring at my feet.” The silver medal-winning Paralympic archer was in Denver last week, telling his inspirational story to disabled people at the Laradon School.
Stutzman had always been an athlete, growing up playing soccer, football, and basketball, as well as hunting. But he didn’t start the sport that would make him well-known until 2010, when he couldn’t find a job, and didn’t know how he was going to feed his wife and kids. It wasn’t the right season to hunt deer with a rifle, but bowhunting was allowed, so his father bought him a bow, and soon he was able to bring home venison for his family.
From the first time Stutzman competed against archers with both arms, he excelled, and a company offered to buy him a bow and become his sponsor. Stutzman sold his old bow to support his family, and used the new one to practice eight hours a day. The sport took him to the Paralympics in London in 2012, where he won the silver medal in archery, losing by a few points to a Jere Forsberg, a wheelchair-bound competitor from Finland.
One of the students Stutzman spoke to, Bryttney Lint, told Tom McGhee, “He touched my heart, he changed my perspective.”
MORE: This Dad Went to Heroic Lengths to Help His Disabled Sons Finish College
Every Disabled Kid Should Have a Music Teacher Like This
Kevin Smith, a music teacher at Balwin, Mo. middle school, couldn’t bear the fact that one of his students, 12-year-old Melissa Henricks, wanted to learn to play the flute but was constrained by her disability. Henricks was born with Persistent Pulmonary Hypertension and suffered from a form of cerebral palsy as a result of the bleeding on her brain.
But the young survivor has always had a passion for music, so Smith worked with the school district to make a flute for her that she could play with one hand, and he even spent his vacation developing a fingering chart that she could use to play it. “If someone is that determined, we want to help that passion, “said Kelly Mignerone, assistant principal at the school. But Smith went above and beyond, working with his wife to find a shop to build the special instrument in Texas. “It’s amazing how wonderful he could be to make this for me,” Henricks said. Every kid should be so lucky to have a teacher like Smith.
These Two Students Developed an Incredibly Cheap Solution to a Common Disability
One out of every 1,000 children born in the world has a congenital defect known as clubfoot that causes their feet to turn inward. The relatively common disability is easy to treat without surgery, but fixing it can cost $300-$700 and requires children to wear a cumbersome orthopedic brace. Luckily, as Wired reports, Stanford students Jeff Yang and Ian Connolly have teamed up with the non-profit miraclefeet to develop a toy-like brace that only costs $20. “We wanted to develop something highly functional, elegant, but using same visual language as a child’s toy,” Connolly told Wired. As you can see in the video above, kids can happily teeter on the light plastic rod without any assistance. That’s a welcome alternative to clunky and expensive metal braces. The Stanford pair hope to get their invention into production soon.
MORE: Teenage Scientist Invents Nuclear Devices for a Safer World
Reinventing the Wheelchair: How Soldiers Are Finding Salvation Through an Unlikely Sport
Leo Curtis woke up two weeks later in a hospital in Germany. He doesn’t really remember what happened, but his injuries read like a perverted grocery list: The back of his skull needed a plate. His brain had been shuffled around, like the yolk of an egg being shaken, and he had lost parts of his memory.
Curtis needed spinal fusions. His right hand had to be reconstructed. His left knee and left ankle had to be repaired. His right ankle was practically removed, and fused back into his leg. His right shoulder had to be put back together. So did his face, which was smashed.
About two weeks before, Curtis, an Army sergeant, was near Baghdad, riding in a Humvee on MSR Tampa, the main supply road between Baghdad and Kuwait, when bombs exploded behind a guardrail. The attack occurred in 2004, at the beginning of the war in Iraq (Curtis was there for the first one, too, in 1991).
MORE: Bravery After Battle: How This Navy SEAL Uses His War Wounds to Help Fellow Soldiers
His Humvee didn’t have the proper armor to prevent what was about to happen. The vehicle had half an inch of steel welded to the frame — enough to stop a bullet, but not an explosion. The soldiers had placed sandbags on the floor to stop stuff from coming in. Continue reading “Reinventing the Wheelchair: How Soldiers Are Finding Salvation Through an Unlikely Sport”
These Engineering Students Turned a Simple Assignment Into Two Years of Hard Work, Innovation and Kindness
In their first year as engineering students at Rice University, Nimish Mittal, Matthew Najoomi and Sergio Gonzales were assigned to build a device that solved a local person’s problem. They soon learned about Dee Faught, a 17-year-old suffering from osteogenesis imperfecta, or brittle bone disease. And after meeting him at Shriner’s Hospital for Children in Houston, they began designing a mobile robotic arm he could use to do simple things that were impossible for his own hands, such as turning on a light or picking up an object. The project turned out to be a major challenge. “We hit a ton of roadblocks,” Gonzales told Joe Palca of NPR, but when the class ended, the team knew they couldn’t give up. Two years later, after working on the project in their free time, the students gave the robotic arm to Faught, who immediately began using it to perform simple tasks. After this success, the engineers plan to continue using their skills to help others. “This has definitely refined the engineering I want to do,” Gonzalez told Palca. “Because it’s an engineering focused on helping people.”
MORE: How This Navy SEAL Uses His War Wounds to Help Other Soldiers
This Dad Went to Heroic Lengths to Help His Disabled Sons Finish College
Brian Horan’s three sons were born with Duchenne, a severe form of muscular dystrophy that is often fatal by age 25. But rather than give in to despair, Horan, 47, set about building a future for his boys, including a college education. When they entered university, Horan quit his job as an auto mechanic in Colorado to become a full-time caretaker and help his wheelchair-bound sons navigate the campus of Metropolitan State University in Denver. To pass the time while his sons took classes, Horan enrolled too, and graduated with a degree in electrical engineering last month. After Horan’s two younger sons graduate next spring, he plans to help them move out on their own, with the support of Band of Brothers, a group for people with muscular dystrophy the Horans recently founded. “There are parents out there in situations like ours who worry about their kids to the point where they don’t let them or want them to experience life,” Horan told Anthony Cotton of the Denver Post. “We’re trying to push our kids to do as much as they can.”