Great advice. Respite was a godsend to my mom when she was doing foster care, especially if there was a doctors appointment or something where it makes it awkward to corral a bunch of munchkins

I know a couple people that are doing it for stroke rehab with a mobile unit about the size of a shoe (plus VR headset and laptop). When I was involved in the field, we did visit a few spinal cord injury clinics, but we had a devil of a time getting usable EMG signals from the patients we worked with. Maybe it was just bad luck, but we couldn’t get any more funding for that project without promising preliminary data.

I’m also really excited for the tech to move forward. Everyone we worked with seemed to genuinely have fun and get lost in the game/training they were doing.

Yup. Being able to activate and control the residual muscles is super useful, especially for advanced prosthetics. A lot of people lose the ability because they have no other reason to use those neural pathways and muscles before they’re fitted for prosthetics, but also because there’s no (or limited) biofeedback. There’s some research into using VR to provide visual feedback to help people, but it requires a baseline level of control that some people simply don’t have without neural stimulation like this. The lack of feedback and control is also one of the proposed mechanisms of phantom limb pain