Slashdot Mirror
Virginia Tech Uses Computerized Knee Brace for Rehab
jimCATDOG writes: "College running back Lee Suggs was injured in VT's first football game, requiring knee surgery and the rest of the season off. VT cares about having the Big East's most prolific scorer healthy. The cool part is that they are using a computerized knee brace to help bring him back to full speed." As the tools available to medical rehabilition improve, what other advances can we expect in the near future?
It is destiny.
someone is going to it, so i will get it out of the way. will it make me "better, stronger, faster?" does it cost $6,000,000? when i jump will it go neh neh neh neh neh neh neh neh neh neh neh neh neh? can i work for oscar goldman when it's all over? thanks, good night everyone.
it's a computerized knee brace... that's why it belongs on slashdot...
Don't be in a hurry, this will take time. How long depends on what kind of surgery you need. Orthoscopic is the least damaging, but any surgery pretty much knocks out your quads and weakens your calf for many weeks. Age and physical condition going into surgery should make a difference. I was 38 when I had mine, and had been riding only about 80 miles/week prior to the injury (I was a grad student, not racing, but riding for fitness). In my twenties I was a cat 2, training about 300 miles per week. So although I didn't return to racing following surgery, my experience may at least give you some idea what you're in for.
After a crash on campus (slipped on an oil patch), I had orthroscopic surgery on my right knee for what the surgeon thought was a torn ACL.. Turned out the ACL was intact, but there was meniscus damage and "a lot of junk and blood in there" that needed to be cleaned up, said the surgeon. I was on crutches for about a week. I used a knee brace for about 9 weeks, during which I was doing physical therapy that included electro-stimulus, stretching, weights, stationary bike, and work with a computerized resistance machine. I was using a turbo trainer 3x a week after two weeks, and was doing short road rides after about a month. Still, even with continued physical therapy and riding, it was a good 3 months before my knee was feeling stable enough, and my quads strong enough, for extended out of the saddle efforts. (I should mention I was off the bike between week 10 and 13 while doing field work in Panama, during which I was hiking up and down hills in the rainforest, so I was still getting a work out.) After 6 months, my leg felt about 85% recovered. 90% after 8 mos. 100% at 12 mos.
If you're younger and have been training, you'll probably recover faster. But my guess is it will still take months to get back to pre-surgery form.
The worst terrorist attack in recorded history occurred just under four weeks ago, and you people are discussing the fact that college running back Lee Suggs was injured in VT's first football game, requiring knee surgery and the rest of the season off and how the cool part is that they are using a computerized knee brace to help bring him back to full speed???? My *god*, people, GET SOME PRIORITIES!
The bodies of 50,000+ dead people could give a good god damn about your college football player injuries, your cool computerized knee braces your childish Lego models, your nerf toys and lack of a "fun" workplace, your Everquest/Diablo/D&D addiction, or any of the other ways you are "getting on with your life".
mother fuckers
Put all that money into developing braces for wrists, instead. Carpal tunnel syndrome is not fun.
Go Hokies!!!!!!!!!!
Don't mod me, bro'!!!!
they are using a computerized knee brace to help bring him back to full speed
Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?
I found a link to another description of the brace here. It seems like a pretty cool little toy for doing this sort of rehab. I'd much rather have this than a woman yelling at my face that I can lift my leg, I just have to try harder.
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
This War on Terrorism is killing innocent people!
"An independent nation of Palestina WILL BE created and if you don't like it, shut the fuck up. If you don't, we'll stop supporting you."
Is this a treatment open to anybody? Why not? I hear in the USA the Rich & Famous get much better health care than the poor. Is this true?
More radio songs are banned in the US in response
to the terrorist attacks.
They are mostly B-side songs, therefore little known.
I doubt anyone would miss them, but censorship is always a bad thing.
Here are some of them:
Alice in Chains - Rust Monster
AC/DC - Santa Claus
Atomic Kitten - Nice butts
Bangles - Head full of Air
Black Sabbath - White Friday
Bush - Dyba
Elton John - Bad Taste
Garbage - Apple
Korn - With P
Led Zeppelin - lleh ot yawriats
Lenny Kravitz - Cut my hair
Limp Bizkit - Teenage dwarfs
Louis Armstrong - I wasn't on the Moon
Madonna - Sexual Obsession
Michael Jackson - From Black to White
Megadeth - Illiterate
Metallica - Trash Noise
Nina - Wrong name
Nine Inch Nails - Hit by a Hammer
Jimmy Hendrix - Grassheads
John Lennon - It's only the manager
Queen - King
Pink Floyd - Another sick in the toilet
Prince - Don't know my name
Rammstein - Magensucht
Rage against the machine - Fuck this car
Red Hot Chilli Peppers - Curry
REM - Loosing my temper
Rolling Stones - Old Farts dancing
Santana - Sleep
Soundgarden - Caput Guitar
The Beatles - Jonny dead
The Doors - We are stuck
U2 - Bloody, bloody boring
Zombies - We not dead
Fight intolerance, racism and censorship !
Here is the official link to donjoy's webpage regarding the product.
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
Take a look at this:
Slashdot.info
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
I piss on Mecca. I menstruate on the Koran. I shit on Mohammed.
I seriously doubt Virginia Tech... umm.. ... er
Eggplants!
Ace
Slashdot needs more nun sex.
Anyhoo, VPI plays in a weak conference with only one decent team other than themselves so missing Mr. Suggs shouldn't be too bad. I say we line the Chokies up in Bristol agin them Vols and let them see what a real football team is like.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
It is not motorized as such. It does limit physical motion to prevent injury.
Otherwise, it is basically a fancy peripheral to a monitor which collects appropriate bio data.
Very useful for rehab, of course, but surprising that someone hadn't come up with something like this before? Or has this been around, and we just never noticed?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I bet you don know any real nuns. I've never known one that I'd call even remotely beautiful or attractive.
A beowulf cluster of computerized knee braces. Maybe that could be used to help an injured octopus. And think of all the RC5 keys you could crack with that baby!
P.S. I'm wearing PAMPERS!!!
Have you flamed SpanishInquisition t
This is nice stuff, but I'm just waiting for that computerized brain stimulator...
42 + 1 = 42
I have a computerized ass. Will you post a story
about it ?
ALL SERIAL KILLERS, almost without exception, are severely sexually abused as children. The kind of people who hijack a plane with innocent people and drive it into a building with thousands of other innocent people are related to this phenomenon.
When sociopaths rape and kill, they do not see their victims as human beings, but only as objects. This is because the sociopaths were themselves, at one time, used as objects as their bodily integrity was repeatedly violated. The rage that results from sexual abuse is one thing, but when combined with living in a dysfunctional culture of sexual repression and misogyny, where love is reduced to violent domination, it is quite another.
Throughout the Islamic Middle East, men and women are taught to be vehemently opposed to pleasure, especially of the sexual variety. Men are raised not only forbidden to touch women, but to even look at them. Sex before marriage is not just a sin -- but a criminal offence. It is punishable by a severe beating at best, and an execution at worst.
The sexual privileges that are allowed in Islamic cultures are permitted to men. Womens sexuality and social independence represent major threats to male supremacy and are tightly controlled. Thus, as the Moroccan feminist Fitna Sabbah reveals in her book Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, there is a disturbing conflict in the Middle East between sexual libido and repression. A deep-seated fear of, and hostility to, individuality prevails, and its main expression exists in misogyny.
Socially segregated from women, Arab men succumb to homosexual behavior. But, interestingly enough, there is no word for "homosexual" in their culture in the modern Western sense. That is because having sex with boys, or with effeminate men, is seen as a social norm. Males serve as available substitutes for unavailable women. The male who does the penetrating, meanwhile, is not emasculated any more than if he had sex with a wife. The male who is penetrated is emasculated. The boy, however, is not, since it is rationalized that he is not yet a man.
In this culture, males sexually penetrating males becomes a manifestation of male power, conferring a status of hyper-masculinity. It is considered to have nothing to do with homosexuality. An unmarried man who has sex with boys is simply doing what men do. As the scholar Bruce Dunne has demonstrated, sex in Islamic societies is not about mutuality between partners, but about the adult male's achievement of pleasure through violent domination.
There is silence around this issue. It is the silence that legitimizes sexual violence against women, such as honor crimes and female circumcision. It is also the silence that forces victimized Arab boys into invisibility. Even though the society does not see their sexual exploitation as being humiliating, the psychological and emotional scars that result from their subordination, powerlessness and humiliation is a given. Traumatized by the violation of their dignity and manliness, they spend the rest of their lives trying to get it back.
The problem is that trying to recover from sexual abuse, and to recapture ones own shattered masculinity, is quite an ordeal in a culture where women are hated and love is interpreted as hegemonic control.
With women out of touch and out of sight -- until marriage, males experience pre-marital sex only in the confines of being with other males. Their sexual outlet mostly includes victimizing younger males just the way they were victimized.
In all of these circumstances, the idea of love is removed from men's understanding of sexuality. Like the essence of Arab masculinity, it is reduced to hurting others by violence. A gigantic rupture develops between men and women, where no harmony, affection or equality is allowed to exist. In relationships between men, meanwhile, affection, solidarity and empathy are left out of the picture. They threaten the hyper-masculine order.
It is excruciating to imagine the sexual confusion, humiliation, and repression that evolve in the mindsets of males in this culture. But it is no surprise that many of these males find their only avenue for gratification in the act of humiliating the foreign "enemy," whose masculinity must be violated at all costs as theirs once was.
Violating the masculinity of the enemy necessitates the dishing out of severe violence against him. In the recent terrorist strikes, therefore, violence against Americans served as a much-needed release of the terrorists bottled-up sexual rage. Moreover, it served as a desperate and pathological testament of the re-masculinization of their emasculated selves.
Well, I guess I am the first Hokie here to write something. But hey, even if the story is about some Jock, I have to say Lee Suggs is still pretty cool, and I did graduate from VT.
Back in the day when it was told that it couldn't be done, we did it and ended up at the Sugarbowl. Too bad the end results were not as well as we had hoped them to be.
But we are still a contender no matter what conference we play as long as we play to the best of our ability and just keep on trucking down the road to BCS!!!
I wonder if there will be any other hokies posting after I....
GOOOO HOKIES!!!!!
is actually Vermont's state abreviation. :|
lets go hokies
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Horror/Sci Fi writer Stephen King was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
As far as actual healing, football has done much for patients of knee problems, as teams and athletes alike are determined to keep valuable players in the game, where a torn ligament decades ago was a career ending injury.
Currently I'm planning to have some knee work done, due to calcification of the anterior of the patella (I put my knee through ice at 11 and created microfractures which healed like sand paper, can hurt like the dickens) something like what Suggs is outfitted with might assist in my recovery program, but it still doesn't cause it to heal faster or tell where healing is at, that's still up to mother nature.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I could have used one of these when I broke my elbow.... As another poster said, it would have been mich better than paying someone to tell you are not trying hard enough... also you could set goals and see when you meet them.
will someone PLEASE suck my god damn motherfucking cock?
-- Yours Truly, Captain "Cocksucker" Picard
In the summer I tore my ACL playing football on turf. After surgery, I got the brace with the DonJoy Vista Rehab Management System. It comes with a little handheld computer that instructs your rehab activity. The brace really helped me out in recovering. My therapist would program specific actives, which she set goals for each, so I could do them when I wasn't at their complex. The brace measured the degree you would bend your leg, and you would have to reach a certain goal, in degrees, given by your therapist. The handheld computer records your information and then makes it so your therapist can read what you have accomplished; making it so you can't lie about doing exercises, and also helping the therapist know where you are in their program. The only thing I didn't like about the brace was I thought it was a bit bulky compared to the other braces I could have got, but I still thought it was worth it.
had been riding only about 80 miles/week prior to the injury (I was a grad student, not racing, but riding for fitness).
I have a question about something related to biking that I've never understood. What, for god's sake, is up with those biking outfits? Do those people who wear more ads than a Nascar driver really think it makes them look cool? Biking has by FAR the most ridiculous looking gear of any sport. Even golf plus-fours look better than bright yellow ass-huggers with some French company plastered on the butt.
I'll bet the bike clothing industry chortles at every industry report about how much they make in advertising revenue. I wouldn't be surprised if they spent massive dollars to somehow convince people that wearing advertising is somehow hip.
I'm sure I'm not the only one wondering this. If you can shed any light on the subject, please give us the straight scoop.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Let's go Wahoos! ph34r us. ;^)
Heck, I'm at The University right now. What else did you think I was going to say?
I do have to admit, however, that that is a really cool step forward in implementing bio-computer interfaces. Too bad it had to come from Virginia Tech... (j/k)
I hope they've got good security. I'd hate for Lee not to be able to bend his leg beacase his knee brace got hit with a DoS attack from a rival school...
Lee Suggs, huh? Sound worse than Dick Trickle to me...
+++ath0
I was never impressed by this kind of story. The costs involved are enough to keep these treatments out of the hands of the general populace and always have been--techniques such as rebuilding cartilage, specialized arthroscopy, and now computerized knee-braces are not for anyone but the ultra-rich and those who can afford to see private sports-medicine practitioners.
It's like we're in the middle of one of the things Tyler Durden in Fight Club complained about: We've all been raised to believe we can be movie stars, or presidents, or super-rich businessmen, or wealthy enough to afford care like this.
But we won't, and we can't.
Makes me sick to read your crappy stories about how some super-overpaid jock gets the best care in the world, while the rest of us suffer our destroyed knees without that kind of medical attention. Jerks!
Now correct me if I'm wrong but... didn't Lee play in today's game where WV was thrashed? Now that must be one hell of a leg brace to allow him to play in a game this soon after surgery. WTF?? Do they have a Beowulf cluster of high-end PCs running nonstop regenerative tissue algorithms and mapping nerve ends? I tell you what they need to do- bring back the Power Glove for the NES ('member those??) for people who lost hands in thresher mishaps. Impress your friends and family as you pen the great American novel while at the same time fighting the nefarious forces of the Red Falcon!
Virginia Tech thought they were injecting rehabilitation nanobots into a patient's knee they forgot to use the latest nanobot software patch released by nanomicrosoft which resulted in the nanobots eating the patient's entire leg.