Jim Ewing

The doctors just, you know, like, there's nothing we can really do for you.

Let's just give you more pain meds.

Ultimately, my research in ankle injuries and ankle rebuilding

kind of led me down the path of, well, I really probably ought to be looking at amputation.

And it just so happens that Hugh Herr and I were roommates back in the mid-80s.

So I knew from having known Hugh that amputation isn't the end of an active life and that you can still do a lot of things as an amputee.

Life isn't necessarily over.

The first few movements were like, oh, wow.

Again, here's Jim Ewing.

My brain got all excited.

My muscles in my leg kind of got all excited.

Like, hey, there's something happening here.

And this phenomenon that Hugh later called neural embodiment occurs.

Your nervous system, your body, your brain recognizes this piece of equipment as being part of you.

You have embodied this thing and it just adopts it and starts using it as if it belongs there.

And actually, it got to the point where while we were doing a bunch of tests, they would occasionally have to turn the robot off to reset things.

And it got to be kind of a not a physically painful.

It was like an emotionally painful experience every time they turned it off.

And I asked them, I said, you have to warn me when you're going to turn it off because it's like jarring to all of a sudden lose my foot again.

That's how much my body had become accustomed to it.