Question: in what concept do you "give people (little) electric shocks " and how dose that help them walk?

Simon Marchant answered on 16 Jun 2015:

Hi! Thanks for the question! It’s called functional electrical stimulation (or F.E.S) and it works like this:

All of your muscles and all of your nerves work on electricity. When you want a muscle to move, your brain sends an electrical signal down a nerve to the right muscle, and that muscle senses it and starts working. In some people, the signal gets stopped halfway down. F.E.S just skips the top half of the nerve, so we attach stickers to the patient’s leg above where there nerve comes close to the surface. We put an electrical signal through the stickers that looks like what the brain normally sends, and the nerve conducts it to the muscle for us, so the muscle contracts!

This kind of stuff only works on people who need help with one or two muscles, we can’t make a paralysed person walk yet because at the moment we can’t move more than two muscles at once (and walking uses a lot of muscles!). So perhaps that could be your next invention! 😀