Gert-Jan Oskam, paralyzed for 12 years, is able to walk again thanks to the brain-spine "digital bridge" interface developed at France's Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). For the first time ever, a human has successfully received an implanted device to enable movement of the arms, hands and fingers after a paralyzing spinal cord injury. Onward Medical NV, a medical technology company based in the Netherlands, announced on Wednesday the surgical implant of its ARC-IM Stimulator, which is designed to restore function to the upper extremities of paralyzed patients. The patient, a 46-year-old man, suffered a spinal cord injury nearly two years ago, which left his left side almost fully paralyzed, doctors told Fox News Digital. The ARC-IM implantation took place on Aug. 14 at Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois (CHUV) in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Michel Roccati stands up and walks in Lausanne. The images made headlines around the world in late 2018. David Mzee, who had been left paralyzed by a partial spinal cord injury suffered in a sports accident, got up from his wheelchair and began to walk with the help of a walker. This was the first proof that Courtine and Bloch's system – which uses electrical stimulation to reactivate spinal neurons – could work effectively in patients. Fast forward three years, and a new milestone has just been reached.

Artificial intelligence is helping people regain their mobility after certain neurological injuries. A robotic harness controlled by a neural network offers tailored treatment that has immediately improved their ability to walk normally. To avoid persistent difficulties walking after a stroke or spinal injury, walking assistance is crucial. But this is a slow process that, if done wrong, can lead to a permanently impaired gait. In the past, several physiotherapists were needed to physically support and guide each person through the process of learning to walk again.

Artificial intelligence software combined with a robotic harness could help spinal injury and stroke patients walk again. Rehabilitation programs for spinal cord injuries or strokes usually have patients walk on treadmills at a steady pace while harnesses support their weight to varying degrees. In the new study, researchers sought to develop a system that better mimicked the conditions that people might experience during everyday life, where they would have to move in more than one direction and vary their gaits. "The idea is to provide the most appropriate environment for patients to be active during training," says study co-author Grégoire Courtine, a neuroscientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne. "The goal of this rehabilitation is to have patients repeat natural activities for an extended amount of time." The scientists developed a robotic harness that uses cables to control the amount of upward and forward force that patients feel while also permitting them to walk forwards, backwards, and side to side.

"Go, go!" was the thought racing through Grégoire Courtine's mind. The French neuroscientist was watching a macaque monkey as it hunched aggressively at one end of a treadmill. His team had used a blade to slice halfway through the animal's spinal cord, paralyzing its right leg. Now Courtine wanted to prove he could get the monkey walking again. To do it, he and colleagues had installed a recording device beneath its skull, touching its motor cortex, and sutured a pad of flexible electrodes around the animal's spinal cord, below the injury.

For more than a decade, neuroscientist Grégoire Courtine has been flying every few months from his lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne to another lab in Beijing, China, where he conducts research on monkeys with the aim of treating spinal-cord injuries. The commute is exhausting -- on occasion he has even flown to Beijing, done experiments, and returned the same night. But it is worth it, says Courtine, because working with monkeys in China is less burdened by regulation than it is in Europe and the United States. And this week, he and his team report the results of experiments in Beijing, in which a wireless brain implant -- that stimulates electrodes in the leg by recreating signals recorded from the brain -- has enabled monkeys with spinal-cord injuries to walk. "They have demonstrated that the animals can regain not only coordinated but also weight-bearing function, which is important for locomotion. This is great work," says Gaurav Sharma, a neuroscientist who has worked on restoring arm movement in paralysed patients, at the non-profit research organization Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio.

COULD hacking our reflexes allow paralysed people to walk again? Some animals have walking reflexes governed by nerves in their spine – it's why a chicken continues to run after its head has been cut off. Now these reflexes have let paralysed monkeys regain use of their legs after a week or two of practice. Previous methods have taken months. We have no reliable means to reconnect severed nerves in people with injured spinal cords. One way to overcome paralysis might be to detect a person's desire to move and use this to stimulate nerves or muscles.