“The first time that I stood up… it was like when you start a run. Now you are a starter for the challenge – the game has begun!” Michel Roccati ...
Bones, Joints & Muscles
17th May 2022
“The first time that I stood up… it was like when you start a run. Now you are a starter for the challenge – the game has begun!” Michel Roccati was 27 years old when he was paralysed in a motorbike accident ...
20th October 2021
Karen Faulkner was shocked when a spinal fracture led to a surprise osteoporosis diagnosis. Having always led a healthy and active lifestyle, at 60 years old she assumed that her risk of developing osteoporosis was very low. “I couldn’t believe ...
8th October 2021
When international high-jumper Jonathan Broom-Edwards was diagnosed with talipes equinovarus at birth, his mum worried it would hold him back. As he took gold at the 2020 Paralympics in Tokyo, he showed just what can be achieved with talipes. “It was ...
29th March 2021
Daniela Knecht had been suffering knee pain for years when she went looking for a way to continue living her full and active life. The first day after her surgery, she was up and about and feeling fantastic. “You know ...
4th January 2021
Simon Leigh had nearly recovered from ankle surgery when he started experiencing intense pain and swelling on the same leg. X-rays and scans led his doctors to an unexpected diagnosis and a little-used medical procedure. “Investigative X-rays showed abnormal bone ...
11th December 2020
Kayleigh Haggo is living proof of her maxim, ‘you can achieve anything you set your mind to’. Fitting with this year’s World Cerebral Palsy Day theme, #CPMakeYourMark, 21-year-old Kayleigh is blazing a trail in the international para-sport of race ...
26th November 2020
Andy Braybrook’s life changed after a near-fatal accident left him permanently paralysed. Three years after his road collision, he is now back on the road and setting his sights even higher. Andy’s story started on the first fine ...
18th November 2020
Before the break in her foot, British middle-distance runner Bobby Clay had no indication that there was anything wrong with her bone health. “I had competed internationally in athletics from a young teenager all the way through to the end ...
3rd November 2020
Three years ago, I needed help getting dressed in the mornings. Now I am a Pilates devotee, living an active, balanced life. My journey with rheumatoid arthritis started out on an otherwise idyllic holiday in France, when I was 42 years ...
21st September 2020
Stelios Kympouropoulos, Psychiatrist and Greek Member of the European Parliament (MEP). I would encourage everyone to pursue their dreams and not let anything stand in their way. At the age of 14 months I was diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) ...
3rd September 2020
“I was fully able-bodied until I was eight. Then one day I woke up and couldn’t walk,” says British Paralympic wheelchair racer Nathan Maguire. It took about two weeks before doctors could confirm that Nathan had transverse myelitis, an ...
11th June 2020
Paralympic wheelchair racer Hannah Cockroft wasn’t expected to survive birth, let alone become a top professional athlete. “I had two cardiac arrests within my first 24 hours of life,” the 27-year-old Brit tells This Is MedTech. Doctors managed to resuscitate ...
27th May 2020
Michel Fornasier was born without his right hand. It may not be the most severe disability, but it is a highly visible one. The physical and emotional challenges this caused affected his confidence as a child. Now he has turned ...
5th March 2020
Mike Rolls says his golf game is stronger as a bilateral amputee than it ever was when he had both his legs. The 37-year-old Australian has come a long way since a deadly infection called meningococcal septicaemia changed the trajectory ...
21st October 2019
Dale Darley didn’t know that she had osteoporosis until she fractured her spine. The British author and book writing coach was living her dream in the hills of Spain when her life changed in an instant. “I suddenly heard ...
16th October 2019
As an elite skier training for the Olympics, Janine Shepherd had built her entire world around sports…until the day she woke up in hospital paralysed from the waist down due to a spinal cord injury. While out cycling on ...
11th September 2019
Phil Crow went into hospital for a gallstone removal procedure expecting to be home the next day. Two months later he was still there, fighting for his life after complications led to sepsis. 'In July 2010 I was admitted to hospital ...
17th June 2019
Serbian tennis pro Nenad Zimonjić talks to MedTechWeek about the total hip replacement surgery that enabled him to continue his career. “It started at Wimbledon in 2009, when I was 33 and ranked number one in the world. After one of the ...
20th May 2019
When you’re a young adult, the last thing you’re thinking about is arthritis. Robin Hughes and his daughter Eleanor certainly didn’t have it on their minds. But they didn’t have osteoarthritis, the type generally associated with ...
20th December 2018
‘Tis the season for travelling, enjoying festive celebrations, shopping till we drop and… sore feet. Our feet are some of the hardest working parts of our body, yet we often take little notice of them until they start hurting. Particularly ...
3rd December 2018
British wheelchair basketball paralympian Laurie Williams has a big list of achievements. Despite being diagnosed with a debilitating nerve condition called motor neuropathy as a toddler following an undiagnosed virus, Laurie later shot to fame on the basketball court, where ...
15th October 2018
Donna Roberts is one of the approximately 350 million people worldwide who have arthritis, but the self-proclaimed “queen of the to-do list” doesn’t let that get in the way of her busy life. It started nearly 18 years ago, when Donna ...
24th June 2018
Maths teacher Sara Hulmston shares how she reclaimed her active lifestyle after suffering from the debilitating symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis (RA). The first hint of Sara’s condition began at age 33, when the ball of her foot started hurting one ...
4th June 2018
Claudia Weber (53) loves outdoor sports and a few years ago started up her own small company for workwear. In 2009 she was diagnosed with hip dysplasia. She didn’t decide to have a hip replacement until 8 years later – when the pain ...
22nd June 2017
Willibald Panzer (61) is passionate about sport. In 2010 he injured his left shoulder while playing beach volleyball. When the pain became unbearable, Willibald decided to have an artificial shoulder fitted. After the operation and subsequent rehabilitation therapy he was able to ...
20th June 2017
Nicolas Lewandrowski (17) is a student in year 11 at a vocational training college. He was born with a heart defect and has had open heart surgery three times already. In 2013 he had a cardiac arrest when playing football and had to ...
31st January 2017
When Peter Schmelter’s kneecap was shattered into five pieces in an accident 55 years ago, the only option was to stick them back together. In 1962, total knee replacements - or TKRs - were still several years away and so Peter, ...
6th December 2016
At barely 18, Jerdain had such intense back pain that he couldn’t even touch his toes. Jerdain is one of the estimated 90,000 people – most of them children and teenagers – who have scoliosis in Jamaica. Scoliosis is a condition that creates ...
29th November 2016
Ironman triathlete and Paralympian Sarah Reinertsen has tried out a lot of legs in her lifetime. Having used everything from a hollow wooden one with two hinges when she had her leg amputated above the knee at age seven, to ...
10th November 2016
Giving an amputee the opportunity to walk again is rewarding work. Seeing that person running towards you on the prosthetic leg you fitted, to give you a great big hug, is even better. That’s why Roger Gonzalez does what ...
20th October 2016
Sports injuries, car accidents and disease – there are lots of reasons why bones can break. Now researchers are dreaming up new ways to heal and protect people of all ages When a 13-year-old child limped into the offices of Professor ...
22nd September 2016
Earlier this month we watched in awe as Paralympians gathered in Rio to show the world what strength, determination and dedication look like in their purest form. We celebrated disability by focusing on ability. In particular, Great Britain’s Paralympics ...
25th August 2016
After losing a leg in 1997, this surfer’s viral video captured the joy of getting back on the board Mike Coots was body boarding in 1997 when his life took a dramatic twist. As he moved towards a rolling wave, he ...
9th August 2016
Every young ballet student’s dream is a pair of toe shoes, the reward for years of training. When Gabi Shull won hers at age 14 the achievement inspired people worldwide – because one of Gabi’s satin slippers is on a ...
30th June 2016
Jordan Reeves, born with what she calls “a little arm,” has worn seven different prosthetic hands in her 10 years. This year, she designed a really special one – a five-barreled glitter blaster. “You can’t be sad when you’re covered ...
20th May 2016
Meet the Syrian students who dropped out of college to set up a mobile clinic that brings artificial limbs to war victims. Amjad Hajj Khamis and his colleague, Abdalrahim Khlouf, have made and fitted around 5,000 prosthetic limbs to victims of ...
18th May 2016
When Lou Cabeen learned she had rheumatoid arthritis her career as an artist could have been derailed. Instead, it marked a turning point in her career and a journey down a new creative avenue. Lou’s hand-woven textiles have filled ...
29th March 2016
Ben Barnes was told he would never walk again after a car accident that paralyzed both legs. Now he’s looking forward to walking the wedding aisle, with a little help from medtech. Ben is among a small number of ...
18th February 2016
He had survived a battlefield explosion. Now he was back in the States with only one leg and so depressed that he refused physical therapy. Suddenly a man appeared at the hospital room door. Tipped off by hospital staff about ...
2nd December 2015
When Kris Saunders-Stowe met the Australian Paralympic team in London in 2012, he was inspired to take up wheelchair basketball. Local gyms had little to offer wheelchair users – so Kris set out to reimagine fitness training for people with differing abilities. “...
20th November 2015
Charlie McLellan had a simple assignment at school: describe your hero. He chose his 6-year-old brother Dan, who has a rare form of muscular dystrophy. “He is special to me because he has poorly muscles but he doesn’t complain ...
22nd October 2015
I thought my daughter’s two-month medical checkup would be pretty straightforward. After all, she was healthy, growing, and already rolling! Then I found out she had hip dysplasia. My daughter is so strong. And yes, everyone thinks their baby ...
12th October 2015
When Jane’s knee pain began tiring her out, she knew it was time to act. She was soon unable to teach dance classes or ride a bike. As a school teacher who spends all day on her feet, arthritis ...
8th September 2015
When Natalia discovered that the New York City Ballet offered dancing workshops for kids, she was eager to sign up her daughter, Pearl. But there was one catch: Pearl has cerebral palsy. Natalia and her daughter, Pearl, spend a lot ...
22nd July 2015
Jay Nickolaus was the jolly old age of 61 when he decided to undertake the climb to Kilimanjaro. If you’re like me, your first introduction to this monument of mountains was Disney’s The Lion King, where it appears as ...
23rd March 2015
From an early age, David Sengeh knew more about prosthetic limbs than he would have wanted. Raised in Sierra Leone during a brutal civil war, he saw loved ones lose arms and legs during vicious assaults. 8,000 men, women and children ...
18th March 2015
She’s extravagant, she’s sexy, she’s blunt. She’s challenging preconceptions and starking conversations. Viktoria Modesta is a true pop star. She was born in Latvia in the late ‘80s, but an accident left the nerves in her ...
16th February 2015
By any measure, Mark Pollock is an extraordinary man with an extraordinary story. Mark's eyesight was failing by the time he entered university but it did not stop him becoming a champion rower, learning to salsa dance and meeting his ...
5th February 2015
When news came out on clinical trials of a bionic hand that can feel, I decided to find out more. And while going through all the high-tech, robotic, and trans-human articles I turned the other way and took a peek ...
29th January 2015
A while back, exoskeletons seemed to exist only in blockbuster movies like Iron man or Elysium. Then, the first real exoskeleton, which helped the paralyzed stand up, walk or climb stairs, became reality. Even the kid who had the first ...
14th October 2014
There are 1,500 people out there from New Zealand through South Africa to Alaska who go home after work, sit down and start working on ‘blueprints’ for hand prosthetics. They’re volunteers and they set out to give “a helping hand” ...
11th September 2014
What was once only the stuff of sci-fi movies and blue sky dreaming is now making more people more mobile. Exoskeletons and artificial muscles are tearing down obstacles and helping people move forward. It took Claire Lomas seventeen days to ...
6th September 2014
No, it wasn't always bionic. It certainly didn't move with neuro-command or feel. But ancient prosthetics were helping their users get from point A to B long before the term 'prosthetic' had even been coined. But there was always a ...