Transcriber: Lisa Thompson Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
I'd like to tell you a story, a story about Robert.
Robert is 51.
He is a lawyer, a successful one from Gliwice.
He has an amazing wife, three wonderful children,
and actually gives back to the community.
What I didn't tell you about Robert - in this picture -
is that, actually, he was diagnosed with a rare genetic disease
at the age of eight, called FSH,
and by the age of 30, Robert was unable to move using his legs
and required a wheelchair to move around.
The problem with Robert is, actually, that he needs rehabilitation to move,
to gain muscle strength, and to function and have good quality of his life.
Can you imagine -
and I dare you to -
what would you do if the next time you went to see a doctor,
you would get a diagnosis
that in five years' time, you would not be able to walk?
Do you think about it?
And think about it, when walking down the street,
what would happen if you got hit by a car and were not able to move tomorrow?
This is actually a worthy question to comprehend and to think about
because the problems with disabilities actually are pretty common,
and we do get them a lot.
In Poland, there are 7.6 million kinesiotherapy procedures done annually.
It's actually rehabilitation by movement.
And this is a problem.
And it's a huge number done in Europe as well and in the U.S.
There is a deficit in the U.S. of physiotherapists -
about 20,000 this year.
And it's estimated to rise up to 60,000 by 2020.
This is a huge problem with healthcare.
And this is not a problem of people with disabilities;
this is our problem.
There is no they, and there is no us; there is only us as a society,
and we have our problems with healthcare, and those are ours to deal with.
What we tried to do and what we tried to understand with disabilities
is what really drives those people.
Those people are actually heroes, struggling day by day.
And we wanted to understand them a little bit more.
We actually rented a wheelchair a couple of months ago
and wanted to understand how it is to ride a wheelchair every day.
And as you can imagine, being given a toy for the office for 20-year-olds,
we took a lot of fun with it.
We drove all around.
We even did wheelies, like standing on two wheels with a wheelchair,
which we're all going to hell for.
But what's most important is that even though we had fun,
there was a little thing that bothered us.
We wanted to leave the office,
and we do have self-locking doors in our offices -
those little brakes at the door that keep them shut.
It took us 15 minutes to leave the room in a wheelchair.
15 minutes.
This is an important problem for all people riding wheelchairs
and for people with physiotherapy in general.
So we wanted to address the problem then.
With Robert and other people with severe neurological diseases
[the problem] is that they need specialists to help them -
specialists:
physiotherapists and doctors -
and that they are hard to come by.
There aren't really that many great experts in the field,
so you have to wait in queues to get to them.
If you've ever been to a doctor in Poland, that's the way it goes:
you go register and you stand in the queue
for a months or even years, depending on what's wrong with you.
So the problem
with experts and specialists in the field of physiotherapy and doctors
is something to be dealt with by us in our society.
So what we tried to do is actually have something to help them,
and we started with exoskeletons.
You can see the first exoskeleton on your left, the upper limb exoskeleton,
and the exoskeleton for the lower limb on your right.
Of course, well, we thought of Iron Man
because duh -
if you're going to do robots, do Iron Man, and we do encourage that.
But although I love the technology myself,
I think exoskeletons are really the future;
they're not really the solution for our problems
because if you have exoskeletons,
you still do need one physiotherapist
and one patient
because you have to have a physiotherapist to handle the patient with exoskeletons,
and it has to be a specialist.
So, still nothing going on there.
You still need specialists.
So we thought,
"What else can we do and how can we help people get the best care possible?"
So what we did is - here, actually, before you.
This is exo-EMG.
This is our first commercially available robot.
This is something - a tool for the physiotherapist.
So it's not, let's say, exoskeleton,
but it's a tool to make any physiotherapist great
with both neurological patients and orthopedic ones.
This actually has a technology called electromyogram active rehabilitation.
Okay?
Let's say -
and I hope you do know this.
I hope I can explain it well.
Our bodies actually work kind of like a computer.
We have a brain;
it fires electrical signals to our muscles,
which then contract and generate a lot more electricity on them.
With multiple sclerosis, muscle atrophies, Duchenne and Becker -
as much as a muscle atrophy like with Jacob here in this picture,
a student of 21 -
those kinds of diseases attack the muscles and make them atrophied.
So Jacob here actually cannot move his arms or legs
and drives a wheelchair and needs professional care every day.
So what we wanted to do is make Jacob move his arms and legs himself.
So we strap electrodes to his muscles
and detect the slightest electrical signals from inside them,
massively amplify them, and use them to control the robot.
And I'd definitely like to show you how this actually works with Paweł here.
Paweł is already strapped to exo-EMG with his bicep,
so he has two electrodes on his body -
actually three -
and this is the robot that moves with Paweł.
We want to calibrate the robot so the robot understands
what kind of muscle strength does Paweł have.
So we'll run the calibration, and Paweł will flex and release his muscle,
and we'll stop the calibration to let the robot move.
Right now, the robot actually works with EMG,
so where Paweł will flex his arm,
the robot will move by those signals themselves.
Why is this important?
It's important because if Paweł was having muscle atrophy,
he couldn't move his arms.
But if he stands near the robot in the front,
he can actually have the robot move his arms
and have an active form of rehab with the robot.
So this is how exo-EMG with electromyogram works itself.
We, of course, wanted something more, well, let's say broader for the patient,
so not only neurological patients;
we wanted also to have the availability to work with orthopedic patients
and a larger spectrum.
So we did get something called continuous active movement.
And Paweł will set it up right now.
We wanted the robot to feel what the patient is doing.
If we're recovering after a surgery or something like that,
it's something we get back from,
so we wanted the robot to feel what we're doing.
So if you actually touch the robot -
there are no electrodes now -
it can be light as a feather,
and it can help you move with little resistance -
it's called dynamic resistance -
but it can be really hard to move if you're recovering.
So if Paweł tries to move it hard, it will make it efficient for him;
it will require him to have better muscles.
So this is how, actually, the two programs we'd like to show you work,
and this is how exo-EMG does it.
But we were thinking, actually, "What more to do?
How can we help and change what we think about rehab and healthcare?"
Because if you think about people going to rehab, you think,
"Okay. This is pain. This is suffering.
This is personal drama for all those patients."
And we want to have a revolution in healthcare.
We want to make physiotherapy great but also fun
and enhance the experience of physical training to enrich what we do,
to change the meaning of what rehab actually is.
And we thought -
and this has been said all over TED,
and not just TEDx here, but over TED conferences all around the world -
how to have the people engaged in a process.
So we thought, "Okay. Let's do games."
Gamification sounds nice.
We'll develop a game that when you move with the robot,
you can actually control an airship collecting stars.
You can move through different maps,
up and down, flexing, doing physical training,
but in the same time, your brain doesn't feel
or doesn't think about, pain, suffering -
This hurts. Why am I here? What am I doing? Am I getting better? -
I'm collecting stars, and I can even fly a dragon if I want to.
So I'm not thinking about that I need to do this; I want to do this.
And we actually had some pretty amazing people play this game
because we've presented it all around Poland and in the U.S.
So, this is former ambassador of the United States for Poland,
Lee Feinstein, playing in Chicago.
He actually scored, in one of our games, 35 points.
We had the Google director from Kraków, Wojtek Burkot,
play this game as well.
He scored 33, so a little less.
But we had multiple people playing this,
but what struck me most and what found us interested in the topic
was two little girls in Chicago as well -
7-year-olds, first time seeing the robot, first time seeing the game,
first time seeing us - never before.
They also played the same game that Wojtek played and scored 33;
they played the same game that Lee played and scored 35.
They both scored 45 points in our game.
7-year-old girls.
It's a game-changer for them
because they need something to keep their minds off physical training.
This is a new generation that we've all experienced here at TEDx.
We heard some amazing speakers talk about how kids are changing what we know
and how we must attune to them.
So this is natural for them.
This is something to keep us interested in rehab
and to redefine - to have a revolution -
what rehabilitation and healthcare actually mean.
In the end, I'd like to leave you with two things.
Well, I ask of you two things, actually.
First of all, I want you not to fear robots.
A lot of people do, and I think that's a mistake
because robots, actually, are a tool for you to get better.
If you understand that,
if you go to your physiotherapist, your doctor: demand best possible care;
don't settle for anything less.
Demand robots.
Demand getting better as fast as you can.
And with it comes responsibility for your healthcare provider,
for rehabilitation centers, for hospitals to make you better.
And the second thing I want to leave you with is that this is one company.
We're EGZOTech, actually.
This is one robot, one company, one team,
and what we're trying to do is redefine a whole industry,
to redefine our thinking,
and it cannot be done by a single robot.
Unfortunately, it cannot.
We do need to act together as a society.
We do need to focus on the problems at hand,
and those are global problems that need our attention.
Doing it together, we need to redefine
and to bring back life into healthcare.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)