A couple of months ago I met a young man, Brayan is a sixteen year old boy with a special condition that prevents him from walking. For more than fourteen years Brayan crawled literally, his family blamed him for not trying hard enough to change his situation, for this reason Brayan tried to commit suicide twice, when I talked to him and he told me his case I saw him cry inconsolably.
What impressed me most about this young man was his ability to keep his dreams alive, despite not being able to walk brayan dreams of being a policeman, he dreams of belonging to a group of special police forces, even living this sad reality, because he hardly ever A few months began to mobilize with a walker.
About nine years ago, the two founders of Rex Bionics, Richard Little and Robert Irving, had the idea of developing this type of robotic legs. The reasons for this were obvious: Robert Irving had already been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and it is clear to him that sooner or later he will end up in a wheelchair. In addition, the fact that the mothers of both are in wheelchairs allows them to put themselves in the place of people who live in a world full of barriers. Consequently, the two friends decided to apply their knowledge and experience as engineers to the development of a machine for those people who normally need a wheelchair to get around.
Initiatives such as this one with different motivations are becoming increasingly common in the world, projects that seek to improve the quality of life of people with disabilities or simply facilitate tasks in factories, avoid injuries, provide assistance in hospital operating rooms etc.
Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the world and there are many advances and innovations that we see frequently, there are many applications that are used today from facial or voice recognition through text predictions among other more complex, developed to make life more practical to the people, until arriving at the robotics that is the branch that more catches my attention.
In the world have developed so far a variety of exoskeletons that allows people who have never had the joy of walking upright or lost their mobility by accident, to get up off the floor or a wheelchair to take their first steps with freedom helped by this "Miracle of Modern Science" and today I want to share with you some of these modern wonders:
| Developed for paraplegics | To help the elderly | First of its kind for children | For military use |
|---|---|---|---|
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The exoskeletons also known as servoarmor, exomarco or exotraje, is a mobile machine consisting primarily of an external frame that can fulfill different functions depending on its purpose.
It is said that there are more than 2.6 million units in the market, made for many purposes, there are some simple ones developed to avoid injuries at work, those for surgical medical use, those that are developed for people with motor disabilities, of military use and those that increase the carrying capacity of a human being.
These have become a real miracle for people who have lost the ability to walk or those who for some reason were born without being able to walk, today they have the opportunity to do so thanks to the robotics. The problem we find in these units lies in the sale price, to be a new technology prices range between $ 100,000 to $ 125,000, something that is not easy to pay for an ordinary person which makes it very difficult to achieve the dream of walking.
Fortunately, technology is advancing very fast and units are being created at a lower cost such as the one developed in Mexico It was created to help the elderly in their mobility and that can be achieved with a price of $ 6,000, however those that help walk people who have totally lost mobility remain inaccessible to the ordinary citizen.
In the world there are many "Brayan" suffering to see how their dream moves away more and more from them, dream of footballer, teacher, doctor, fireman, policeman, farmer among others. Unfortunately some do not have what it takes to buy a unit like this.
I think you need inventors and investors who can develop a project where expenses are reduced to their minimum expression and there may be more people in the world with access to this type of technology.
Conclusion
It would be nice to see Brayan walk, see him fulfill his dream some day, but the reality of this young dreamer is that he does not have the resources to access a unit like this that allows him to have some autonomy, nor is it available in Latin America or Venezuela. What I know is that brayan may be Andres, Julian, Ramón, Pedro or Juan who like them there are thousands of people in the millions of people in the world to whom this technology could change their lives forever.
We celebrate the existence of a technology like this and the growth it is having, but I think that the greatest impact will be achieved when a greater number of people know about it and use the devices created to improve their quality of life.
Share your opinion with me
What do you think of the exoskeletons? Do you know anyone who has been benefited with one of this? What could we do to make them reach more people?
Pr EV
#PROJETHOPE
