Dr. Ron Triolo, Executive Director of the APT Center, Senior Career Scientist at the Louis Stokes Cleveland VAMC, and Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Case Western Reserve University has received a four-year, $1.2M Rehabilitation Research and Development Merit Award from the Department of Veterans Affairs entitled “Neural Stimulation to Enhance Community Mobility after Incomplete SCI”.  The overall goal of this project is to enable Veterans with partial paralysis due to incomplete spinal cord injury (iSCI) to improve their daily walking capabilities and become functional ambulators in home or community environments.

Dr. Triolo and his team will develop and implement new, practical, and readily customizable control systems for peripheral nerve stimulation to augment the actions of selected muscles based on real-time feedback of voluntary body movements.  The proposed gait assist controller will process inputs from a small set of body-mounted sensors that can estimate movement of the user’s center of mass. These sensors communicate with a surface or implanted stimulator to control the activation of the paralyzed or partially paralyzed muscles and seamlessly coordinate them with voluntary contractions to advance the body forward, intuitively vary walking speed, and take corrective steps to recover from unexpected and potentially destabilizing disturbances.

This study is an important next step toward preparing wider scale application in larger clinical trials of the gait assist system via a VA Translational Rehabilitation Research Award or the Cooperative Studies Program. Successful completion of this project will define a new intervention for Veterans with difficulty walking due to partial paralysis from iSCI, thus enhancing their independence and accelerating their access to life opportunities as active participants in their communities and society at large.