EMA

"I was at a friend's birthday party. As I was walking to my car, a bullet hit me out of nowhere. Since 2012 I can't walk anymore," says Estevão Carvalho Lopes. Later it turned out that the bullet came from a nearby shooting that had nothing to do with him or the party.

It soon became clear that the Brazilian had to continue his life as a paraplegic and he was faced with a decision: "Am I making something out of this new situation or will I be angry about it for the rest of my life?” Estevão chose the former. "To be honest, my life, my lifestyle, is now better than before. I got into sports, I have become a Paralympic athlete and I can live on it. But above all, I have discovered my mission to bring Paralympics and similar activities for the disabled to the outside world and to motivate others to do sports". He has been on the FES bike since 2016 and has already participated in the past two editions of the CYBATHLON (2016 and 2020). "My wish is to be able to ride the bike in the future without help from others."

Our device is composed of a commercially available trike, a HASOMED FES stimulator, a Raspberi Py embedded computer running the Robot Operating System (ROS) and a few custom electronic circuits.
With this setup, we have a reliable and flexible system which allows us to practice regularly and run different configurations for research. We can easily switch from conventional electrode pair stimulation to Spatially Distributed Sequential Stimulation (SDSS) or we can easily alternate between an inertial sensor or an encoder as the crank angle measurement, for example.