Three paralysed people have regained the ability to walk, swim and pedal thanks to a new treatment featuring electrodes implanted into their spines developed by a group coordinated by the EPFL university in Lausanne, Switzerland. The system uses the electrodes to send electrical impulses generated by a computer controlled by the patient to the muscles of the legs and the torso to make the movements possible, as documented by a paper published in Nature Medicine.

An Italian expert, Silvestro Micera, who works for the EPFL and Pisa's Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, is part of the team behind the breakthrough. One of the three patients involved in the experimentation of the system is Italian too.