I am a physical therapist in the making who is blessed to learn what the career embodies at an extraordinary institution. I graduated with magna cum laude honor at the University of Texas Pan American obtaining a bachelors degree in kinesiology which specialized in athletic training. That served as a milestone to prepare me for the doctorate program of physical therapy at Texas Woman's University. Aside from being a full-time student, I enjoy any activity related to improving fitness and coordination to keep me sane throughout my rigorous program, such as weight lifting, pilates, yoga, Zumba, basketball, volleyball, and exploring the outdoors. I think it is ironic how movement can be a factor for injury when it can also be the regimen for a healed body if done wisely. Appreciating the gift of movement is the ultimate reason why I chose to pursue physical therapy as my future career.

Essay: Personalized Neuroprosthetics

Gregoire Courtine is a neuroscientist from Switzerland who specializes in creating rehabilitative technology for paralyzed patients that have suffered from a spinal cord injury. By collaborating with an interdisciplinary team of healthcare professionals, neurobiologists, and engineers, Courtine was able to produce a well-rounded design that aimed to remodel an injured spinal cord, reawaken its connection with the brain, and reproduce coordinated voluntary movement. This phenomenal intervention has yet to reach human trials, but it has produced impressive results in animal models. I believe that Courtine's innovation will carry on and change the quality of life in paralyzed individuals. The technology is named "personalized neuroprosthetics", and it contains three essential components.

First, a pharmacological agent must be injected into the spinal cord to nurture damaged neural pathways. Second, an electrode transmits pulses down the spinal cord from the level of injury to excite movement. With those first two components working together, an individual would already have the ability to stand. Finally, a supporting robotic system is externally attached overhead onto the individual allowing multiple degrees of freedom for voluntary movement. Unlike conventional prosthesis, the robot is not exactly a portable piece of equipment to wear for everyday living, nor is it an exoskeleton suit that engages in passive motion of paralyzed limbs. Like a mother holding onto a child's hands overhead during his or her first steps, the robot provides weightless support to the body within a certain boundary. Although the space it allows the individual to move is limited, the robot provides conditions for the brain to encourage voluntary movement. All the individual needs is a reward to move towards to as a goal to reach at the finish line.

Courtine steers away from the classical rehabilitation regimen, which involves placing the subject on a moving treadmill. It is fascinating that this method produces locomotion due to the spinal cord independently receiving proprioceptive information from the moving leg and making the decision to activate the muscles to move them. However, movement is completely involuntary and limited to only one degree of freedom on a linear path. That is why the robot mentioned previously was developed so it can allow an individual to move freely within a three-dimensional space and boost plasticity of the entire nervous system.

Personalized neuroprosthetics is a radically new concept, but it wouldn't have existed without required hundreds of years of research on spinal cord physiology.. Bringing the entire robotic system into your home or everywhere you go does not sound pragmatic. However, I could envision this system being used in any clinical setting as an instrument for training until there is no more need of it. A patient would progress from walking with the system in a limited space to walking freely outside hospital doors because the brain, spinal cord, and limbs would have already re-established their neuromuscular connections. Because it is not a device moving for you, muscle growth is encouraged, which I believe is a strong benefit that other neuroprosthetic technologies lack. Every goal in rehabilitation is to increase independence, improve quality of life, and restore function to a normal state as if the injury never happened, and I believe that Courtine's intelligent invention will accomplish all of those plans.