Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the most recent edition of CWRU Medicine magazine. Learn more about the magazine.
As Ron Triolo turned up the nerve stimulator in his lab at the Louis Stokes Cleveland Veterans Affairs Medical Center, the research trial participant connected to the machine immediately perked up.
“That’s my big toe!” he said. “If I had a big toe.”
The trial participant—a military veteran who had lost his leg after stepping on a landmine in Vietnam 50 years ago—was like so many others Triolo, a professor of orthopedics and biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, has worked with across more than 25 years. They are paralyzed by spinal cord injuries, stroke or multiple sclerosis, or they’ve lost limbs. But they haven’t lost hope.
Neither has Triolo.
As executive director of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ Advanced Platform Technology Center, Triolo has overseen the design, prototyping and production of novel medical devices for the rehabilitation of people with sensorimotor impairments or limb loss. He conducts research on the development and clinical application of neuroprostheses and restorative technologies, biomechanics and the control of movement, rehabilitation engineering and assistive technology.
For people like the military veteran, Triolo and his research team have used implanted electrodes to stimulate sensory nerves associated with lost limbs, which then carry a message to the spinal cord and brain that generate perceptions of sensation related to what the missing limbs would be feeling if they were still there.