In a story picked up from BBC News, doctors at Guy's and St. Thomas' Hospital have taken the same motion sensing technology we waste on stomping turtles and adapted it to a pain-relieving neurostimulator implant, severely improving the lifestyle of at least one patient.
Neurostimulators are implants that send off a level of electrical impulse directly to the spinal cord, muddling pain sensors in patients that are either recovering from severe trauma or, as in the case of our above patient, Robert Mason, suffer irreversible trauma everyday of their lives. They work as a signal jammer--the brain is unable to get the proper signal from the pain sensors in the body because the implant creates, for lack of a better term, sensory 'static', reducing crippling pain to a mild tingling sensation.
To date, the biggest drawbacks of neurostimulators has been a measured dosage of electrical impulse. As anyone whose every pulled a muscle can attest, different postures and body positions can increase or decrease the level of pain suffered, depending on the injury, and the neurostimulator previously was unable to gauge when a person needed less or more relief.
Using the increasingly-more-common-everyday motion sensing and accelerator technology we find in our Wii's and iPhones, the neurostimulator can be programmed to react to different body positionings by giving variable levels of impulse relief.
Mason's take on the results, from the BBC article:
"My pain has been a constant eight out of 10, like the worst toothache
you can imagine. I get about two hours sleep a night at best, and then
only in short bursts."
But the father-of-three, who is the first patient in the UK to have a
neurostimulator with an in-built motion sensor, said he was delighted
with the results.
"It's brilliant. Now I can have the kids sitting on my lap, whereas
before I was wriggling in pain. I feel like a proper parent again. I am
looking forward to getting four hours straight sleep at night and hoping
to get back to work."
Mr Mason still feels pain, but said the neurostimulator had reduced it
from an eight out of 10 to four.
Doctors both at Guy's and St. Thomas' and from the British Pain Society are tremendously pleased with the technologies results, and speculate that it could help better the lives of thousands of suffers of back and leg pain each year.
