Question: How close is your research to finding a way to build a suit that could enable people with Multiple Sclerosis to regain their ability to move parts of their bodies?

Neil Dhir answered on 16 Jun 2014:

I am afraid to say that it appears to be very far away. That said, there is a very large field of robotics called rehabilitation robotics, where they actually build the physical suits and motors required for something not too dis-similar from the Iron Man suit (which I am sure you have seen).

Where my research if focused really is trying to make these suits and exoskeletons (as they are known) move and act like real limbs. So you can imagine say someone who is, say, paralysed from the waist down. Now, this means that we need to replicate their central and peripheral nervous system such that it accurately replicates a real and healthy nervous system. The kind they would have had if they were not paralysed.

This is very very hard.

The human brain has 200 billion neurons (small cells that fire electrical pulses, which fire in sequences and different combinations, which the body encodes as muscle commands), and our job is to try and replicate just a tiny tiny part of this which we can then use to build a model a computer motion mode of the human leg. If we succeed in doing that then we can build a control system for that motion model, and if that works as well, then we are really onto something! If we can get to that stage we can then build a control system that is accurate and safe enough to be put into an exoskeleton and which the user can then use to move again, where the motion it produces are similar, if not identical, to those a healthy person would produce.