With a brain implant, a paraplegic can walk again – health

At the beginning, Gert-Jan needs a little help. He cannot manage the short, steep ramp into the auditorium at the University Hospital in Lausanne (CHUV) on his own. But then the demonstration works. The 40-year-old, who has been paralyzed from the waist down since a bicycle accident in 2011, walks slowly with his walker, but controls the few meters to the middle of the lecture hall, where he answers questions from the assembled journalists. The topic of the press conference: a new technology developed in Lausanne and Grenoble, thanks to which people with spinal cord injuries like Gert-Jan can learn to walk again.