Indego Therapy - Enabling Alice's Story
A previous article featured Alice and her story of recovery from a hypoxic brain injury. As a young woman she was looking at a situation in which she would be in bed for 23 hours a day and hoisted to a wheelchair for the rest of each day. Indego along with the efforts of the More Rehab team have got Alice back on her feet and moving toward independence.
The fact that she was believed to have no potential for improvement seems harsh in retrospect, but this expectation was based on what seemed to be realistic to achieve with “conventional” therapy. applied in a situation where resources of therapy time are constrained.
We often say that good technology combined with good therapy can produce great results and this is what happened with Alice.
If you haven’t seen the video yet take a look here.
Since the topic of neuroplasticity came into public awareness it brought hope of the potential for recovery. The basic recipe for recovering function goes something like this - therapy needs to be frequent, intensive and task specific.
In the video, James remarks how using the Indego meant they could achieve intensity of training with Alice. Indego allowed them to carry out thousands of steps in a session - something that would be impossible without the Indego. But is that enough to create the results we see? I think not.
I can go to the golf range each day and hit hundreds of golf shots but this is probably not going to make me a better golfer. I may actually be just reinforcing my bad golf swing.
Alice’s situation would be a bit like that. If we use an exoskeleton to just crank out the steps without paying attention to the form, then all we would do is reinforce an undesirable gait pattern. Neuoplasticity allows any repeated pattern of “behaviour” to become manifest. It will just as easily reinforce a bad pattern as a good pattern.
Where the Indego is special is that it has a unique combination of hardware and software to control the style and performance of gait wherever the patient is in terms of stage of recovery. The trained therapist can fine tune the gait pattern so that bad habits are not reinforced.
The Indego Specialist therapist can use two software systems to control Indego - Therapy+ and Motion+
Depending on the patient’s stage of recovery this software provides the ideal platform to support the best gait pattern for improvement.
We believe that the Indego represents not just the leading Personal Use exoskeleton but by far the most advanced therapy tool.
If you are interested in adopting Indego in your clinic or you believe you could benefit from using the Indego in therapy then please contact us .