Agencies
NEW DELHI, Feb 23: AIIMS Delhi and DRDO are collaborating on a project to develop a special exoskeleton for soldiers who have been injured in service and have lost their ability to walk or became paralysed. This exoskeleton will enable the injured soldiers to walk again. Professor Bhavuk Garg, department of Orthopaedics AIIMS, said, "We have the best gait lab in India and right now, in the first phase, we are looking and collecting data about muscle activation patterns in people while walking, Once we have this data, we will feed it into a wearable robot kind of thing called an exoskeleton, which will enable paralytic people to walk."
Professor Ravi Mittal, Head of Orthopaedic Department in AIIMS, said, "In our Gait Lab, we record the movements of knees, legs, etc. For this, we record them by placing many sensors and cameras on the body. After which, all this data is collected and fed into the computer and then it is analysed. After this, every parameter is checked. It is studied. We find out how the person walks, how his legs rotate, what the speed is, and how much the gap is. All these things are being worked on very minutely.
Dr Mittal said that they study in detail a person's walk. "What is the movement of the rest of his body? What is the effect on his shoulders and head? Every single thing is recorded in detail and from this, we find out how much difference there is between the gait of a person who is completely healthy and the gait of a person who is ill. Gait Lab is a study done on all these things, through which we can find out the data," he said. The Gait Lab study was not in India earlier and this study has been conducted at AIIMS Delhi for about 5 years.
The doctor said that in a disease like osteoarthritis, the joints wear out. "After this, the part of the body where there is a problem requires replacement, such as knee replacement, etc. But through the gait lab study, we find out how his gait has changed and what his statistics are. A gait lab study is performed to determine the quantity. What changes took place in the entire body? What were the parameters? Its numbers are known. In this series, such an exoskeleton is being prepared through this study. So that it will help those people who are unable to stand or have problems walking, those patients will be able to walk properly, stand and do their other work by wearing the exoskeleton." |
