“The idea is brilliantly simple” summarizes Professor François Puisieux, head of the gerontology unit at the Lille University Hospital. A unit that has been associated for 5 years with the design of Oxilio, an exoskeleton chair that assists people who have difficulty walking due to age, a chronic illness or an accident. “It’s a wheelchair, an exoskeleton and a walker all in one”specifies Eléonore Bayen, head of the neurology-rehabilitation department at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in ParisThis professor tested this revolutionary chair for 10 months with 5 patients.
“It’s a device that, at first glance, looks a lot like a wheelchair since all the exoskeleton functions are inside the device that deploys when you stand up.explain Damien Roche, engineer and founder of Lifebloom. It has the particularity of reproducing a natural gait, the patient must make the movements and the device will provide him with partial assistance, his just need for assistance in strength and balance to get back up on his feet alone and walk safely again”. This chair can be broken down into three parts : the chair itself, an on-board laboratory that continuously analyzes gait and a digital platform where the patient finds his personalized training program and his progress. The Lifebloom company did not wish to communicate the price of the chair while waiting for its mass production. It is launching a fundraising campaign to set up a manufacturing site and individuals can test the chair by contacting Lifebloom on its website.
132 million people affected worldwide
According to the founder of Lifebloom, 132 million people on the planet are likely to use this technology, including 470,000 in France. Care staff is needed to begin any rehabilitation and to take ownership of the chair, but the idea is that the patient can then self-educate without anyone at their side, the chair incorporating an anti-fall device. “In rehabilitation, there is what we call a dose effectexplains Eléonore Bayen. The more you do language rehabilitation and in this specific case, it is motor skills, the greater the effect will be. Although we are in France with a very good health system and a rehabilitation service with at least 2 to 3 hours of rehabilitation every day, the patient will complete and do a total of 5 to 6 hours per day! You add rehabilitation time without staff nearby and in a safe manner.”Faced with an aging population and an increase in related pathologies, this innovation can therefore help to “relieve” the shortage of healthcare personnel.
The gerontology center of the Lille University Hospital on the front line
Professor François Puisieux has been involved in the design of this chair since the beginning, in 2019: “People were confined to their armchairs until now, this is an absolutely real therapeutic advance for geriatrics and rehabilitation. This allows people to be upright. If we want to remain autonomous, independent, we must be able to be upright in many situations in our lives”. As the patient’s progress is rapid, given the possibility of training alone, the psychological aspect is important: “We know that often the limit of rehabilitation is the patient’s motivation. A patient who manages to get back on their feet is very motivated to make progress, the family is also motivated to support them and even the educators who see the abilities that the patient can regain. This plays a lot on people’s ability to recover, it is considerable progress.”.
