Robotic Suit Helps Children with Cerebral Palsy Walk

 A team at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center has created a robotic exoskeleton that may help children with cerebral palsy walk a little easier. According to a CNN news report, researchers showed that the robotic suit, which looks more like superhero armor than medical equipment, was safe and may be worn to help children walk on their own. They also showed that the improvements in walking with the exoskeleton increased over time as children continued to use it. The study was published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
Doctors say the exoskeleton helps improve the upright posture when worn while still requiring the person wearing it to control their own muscles and stability. Children with cerebral palsy have a permanent physical disability. So, this type of equipment, researchers say can help them continuously monitor and work to maintain their motor functioning as part of the daily lives. The exoskeleton has been found to reduce the crouch in the person wearing it by changing their posture and helping in the extension of their knees. Based on the news report, more research is needed before robotic exoskeletons can be made available to children with cerebral palsy nationwide.

What is Cerebral Palsy?
Cerebral palsy is caused by abnormal development in the part of the brain that controls movement and mobility. Many children develop cerebral palsy as the result of brain injury that is suffered during birth. These types of injuries tend to be the result of lack of proper fetal monitoring. There is no cure for cerebral palsy. However, supporting treatments, rehabilitation, medications and surgery may help improve motor skills. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in the United States, cerebral palsy affects about one in 323 children.
Common Causes of Cerebral Palsy
Cerebral palsy is often caused by issues that are not properly noticed or diagnosed during a pregnancy. Here are some of the most common factors relating to cerebral palsy:
• Oxygen deprivation: This is leading cause of cerebral palsy among infants. When oxygen is cut off from the child’s brain during birth due to complications such as breech birth or umbilical cord entanglement, the baby may get asphyxiated. This type of asphyxiation causes injury and may lead to cerebral palsy.
• Brain trauma during birth: Any type of trauma or injury to the infant’s brain during birth can cause cerebral palsy. Unfortunately, head injuries commonly occur due to negligence during labor or delivery. For example, when an obstetrician applies too much force on the baby’s head while attempting to extricate the baby from the birth canal, cerebral palsy may occur.
• Infections: Mothers can transmit infections such as a urinary tract infection to the fetus during pregnancy. Such infections may cause a mother’s immune system to release proteins that not only attack the infection, but also cause inflammation in the child’s brain that interferes with normal development.
Other factors that may cause cerebral palsy include breech births (where the baby is in feet-first position instead of head-first); complicated labor and delivery; low birth weight; premature birth; and incompatible Rh blood type between baby and mother.
Seeking Compensation
The CDC estimates that the lifetime expenses for caring for a cerebral palsy victim may well exceed $1,000,000. These high costs point to the extraordinary expense of treating this complex disorder as well the indirect costs associated with living with cerebral palsy. If your child is affected by cerebral palsy or another type of birth injury that is due to medical negligence, you may be able to file a birth injury lawsuit against the doctor, hospital, medical staff and other responsible parties. Families may be able to seek damages including, but not limited to, medical expenses, lost income and benefits, hospitalization, cost of therapy and rehabilitative treatments, medical equipment, permanent injuries, disabilities, past and future pain and suffering, etc.
If your child has been diagnosed with cerebral palsy as the result of medical negligence, the experienced New York personal injury attorneys at the Law Offices of Kenneth A. Wilhelm can help you better understand your legal rights and options, and also fight hard to recover just compensation for you.
Our law firm helped a family secure a $43,940,000 verdict for a child who was diagnosed with cerebral palsy. Another client received a $23,500,000 verdict for a child who developed cerebral palsy and mental retardation after suffering a birth injury. Both verdicts were so large that they were reduced on appeal. We also recovered $1,400,000 for a newborn who lost motion in the arm during birth due to doctors applying incorrect force on the baby’s head
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Source: http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/08/health/cerebral-palsy-robotic-exoskeleton-teching/index.html