Since the first time a human figured out that leaning on a stick could help him keep moving toward safely despite the pain of an injured leg, mankind has been working its way toward what's envisioned by the people who staff Cleveland State University's brand-new Parker Hannifin Motion and Control Lab.
It may be that we will never escape some variation on the lowly crutch, but the people at Cleveland-based Parker Hannifin Corp. and the $2 million lab it has set up at CSU are working hard to take the walking-aid concept to the next level.
Parker Hannifin bills itself as "the world's leading diversified manufacturer of motion and control technologies and systems, providing precision-engineered solutions for a wide variety of mobile, industrial and aerospace markets."
One of those mobile markets is the human race, and the company's foray into making life better for people whose mobility has been diminished is welcome indeed.
About our editorials
Plain Dealer editorials express the view of the
the publisher, editor and editorial-writing staff. As is traditional, editorials are unsigned and intended to be seen as the voice of the newspaper.
• Talk about the topic of this editorial in the comments below.
• Send a letter to the editor, which will be considered for print publication.
• Email general questions or comments about the editorial board to Elizabeth Sullivan, opinion director for the Northeast Ohio Media Group.
The lab at CSU will help by enhancing a field that has made quantum leaps in the last couple of decades: the intensive study of how the body moves.
Its chief researcher is Antonie "Ton" van den Bogert, whose understanding of human motion has greatly improved the relatively frivolous realms of moviemaking and video game design. Now, van den Bogert has turned his Academy Award-winning skills to the challenges of helping Parker Hannifin and CSU students build machinery to do the work -- bending, flexing, lifting, grasping, balancing, walking, even running -- that damaged human limbs no longer can perform.
The lab's primary focus now is on improving a motorized walking-assist exoskeleton whose computer reads its wearer's upper-body motions and signals the legs to move accordingly. (The wearer is also supported by that familiar crutch.)
That hardly sounds like a small start -- and to a paraplegic, it might well sound like an outright miracle.
Still, it doesn't take a great leap of imagination to think that work done right here in Cleveland might someday allow a quadriplegic to wear a computerized mechanical exoskeleton that essentially gives him a new and functioning body.