My daughter, Lorelei, lost the use of her arm after a rare illness. After learning, there were no treatments we could afford, and only a 2% chance of recovery, we decided to use Open Social Innovation and build our own solution. A year later, leveraging the collective intelligence of experts around the world we built a brain-controlled exoskeleton, 100X cheaper, 10X lighter, and one that enabled Lorelei’s motor neurons to repair themselves! Today she can move, unassisted and has recovered 60% of her strength :)
And the plans to build it are completely open too!
How it came together
This is a guest lecture I gave to a few universities that explains how Open innovation, 10 years of my work, and the collective intelligence of a group of strangers came together to help us.
This is an open project available to all
“When my daughter became paralyzed, she helped me build a robotic arm—and reclaim hope. ”
Help us reach Neuralink and Elon Musk
Neuralink is a fascinating technology company that is developing a brain interface that would radically help us. Currently, we are picking up brain signals from the skin, however, this approach is only able to pick up the strongest of signals and there are significant issues with signal noise that requires us to continually retrain our models. However, with a Neuralink shunt, we could theoretically get a super high fidelity signal to bridge the gap of her broken motor neurons. We realize this is still early days for this tech, and we would not want to be an early user, however, as an opportunity to simply learn from what they are doing we are trying to reach out to them.
Help by sharing these tweets:
To do so we have several tweets we occasionally share, and it would be great if you could share these too: https://twitter.com/BodoHoenen/status/1469371465455882243
