'RiceWrist' retrains motor skills after spinal-cord injury

Almost exactly a year ago, in April 2010, professional motocross rider Randy Childers sustained serious injuries after a crash in the last race of the day at Cowboy Badlands in West Beaumont, Texas. He suffered broken ribs and a fractured wrist, but most seriously a crushed vertebra in his neck (C3) that required him to be airlifted to Houston, where surgeons inserted an artificial vertebra and fused two others together (C4 and C5) during a marathon operation that lasted 12 hours. Today, the 24-year-old is the star in a single-patient trial of Rice University's RiceWrist robot, a wearable exoskeleton that mimics the joints from his shoulder to his hand. After months of traditional physical therapy, Childers had recovered enough by October to walk (albeit slowly) into the basement lab at Rice and begin to use the RiceWrist, which is built to reconnect motor pathways in the brain through repetitive movement. After just two weeks, Rice Professor Marcia O'Malley says, Childers was doing most of the work himself.