23 Dec Christmas campaign “la Caixa”: Person by person

This year, “la Caixa” sends their Christmas Greetings through the campaign Person by person, thanking all those who have been involved in their social projects.

“There’s no greater wish this Christmas than to continue doing what we’ve always done: change the world, person by person”. (Campaign’s message).

At ”la Caixa” they believe in people and their capacity to grow, work and overcome adversity. They believe in education, culture and research as drivers of progress. They believe in a society with more opportunities and in a better future for everyone and they work in thousands of projects to build such a future.

ABLE Human Motion is one of those projects that has received support from “la Caixa” through their CaixaImpulse Programme, which has accompanied us to move from a research project to a company. CaixaImpulse helped us to further develop our prototype and perform pilot studies with patients at Institut Guttmann. CaixaImpulse also gave us access to mentoring and training sessions with experts in intellectual property rights management, market validation, business model development, finance and fundraising.

We are honored to be part of the campaign and thank “la Caixa” for all the support provided so far.

As part of the “Person by person” campaign, a video where Ivan Camps, our Exoskeleton Pilot, shares his experience has been released. At the age of 36, Ivan was working as an operator in a factory. Then he began to notice a lumbar prick which turned out to be a medullary cavernoma that was compressing his spinal cord. He had surgery to remove the tumor knowing that possibly he would lose mobility in his legs. And so it was, after the surgery, he was diagnosed with a spinal cord injury at thoracic vertebrae 11 with a complete motor loss. He began with rehabilitation, where he tried 2 robotic exoskeletons. Then, he knew about ABLE through social networks and we “magically” got in touch. Since then, he has become the pilot of our exoskeleton.

Ivan is a key member of the team.

With him, we first test all new developments and features to adapt, change or redesign the device. Involving end-users like Ivan and receiving this early feedback is a very important part of the innovation process, and makes us progress on the way to create exoskeletons that users are proud of.