Monthly Archives: April 2019

The Xbox Adaptive Controller is a pretty impressive piece of kit, and though its uses in helping people with limited mobility game against are clear, it has a new mission. Microsoft announced today that the Xbox Adaptive Controller will be heading to a number of VA rehabilitation facilities around the country. There, it’ll be used in therapy for injured veterans and help them play games again.

Microsoft has partnered with the VA to get the Xbox Adaptive controller into those VA rehab centers. At first, Microsoft will supply controllers, consoles, and games to 22 VA medical centers across the country, with the goal of reintroducing gaming to veterans who have suffered amputations, spinal cord injuries, or neurological injuries.

“Dogs, cats, snakes, anything. People fall in love with them. There’s no replacement. They fill a chunk of life that no other being can.”

Professor Bryce Vissel from the University of Technology Sydney wants “no less than a cure” for spinal cord injury patients.

The 26-year-old is the first wheelchair player to train full-time at the USTA National Campus.

After winning Paralympic Gold at the 2016 Rio Games, Mackenzie Soldan considered the elite athlete chapter in her life to be officially closed. The then-24-year-old had finally attained her girlhood dream—winning women’s wheelchair basketball at the highest level in the world—and figured it was time to start building a more long-term professional career.

Ashlee Florrimell is a self-proclaimed “water baby” so, despite being a paraplegic, it was a natural progression to start scuba diving and “exploring the bottom of the ocean”.

Ms Florrimell, 31, undertook a ground-breaking scuba diving course for people with spinal cord injury on Sydney’s northern beaches last week and has become a certified diver.

Falci Adaptive Motorsports is backed by Furniture Row’s Barney Visser

Five people with mobility challenges, including three U.S. Paralympians, were recently treated to a ride-and-drive experience in a Toyota Camry at Richmond Raceway. The event was a prelude to this weekend’s Toyota-sponsored NASCAR Cup and Xfinity Series races at the ¾-mile, D-shaped track in Virginia’s capital city.

It was the year’s second event for the Denver-based Falci Adaptive Motorsports team.

When Don McGrail first met Garrett FitzGerald out of the Secret Service’s Boston office in September 2015, he noticed a focused, driven individual.

And though FitzGerald’s circumstances have dramatically changed since, that hasn’t changed.

An accident that left FitzGerald paralyzed in December 2015 changed him physically, but it hasn’t affected his determination. It’s pushed him through challenging times, through years of rehab at Journey Forward as he continues to try to improve, and it will no doubt carry him this Monday. That’s when he and McGrail will combine to be a dual team — FitzGerald in a wheelchair, and McGrail pushing him — as they run the Boston Marathon, a goal that’s been years in the making.

JNCASR researchers find out that it has the ability to reprogramme damaged nerve cells

A small molecule synthesised by researchers at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), in Bengaluru, may have the power to make patients paralysed by spinal cord injury walk again.

An international team of researchers who worked with the molecule demonstrated that it has the ability to reprogramme nerve cells damaged during a spinal cord injury in animals, recover sensory and motor functions.

As Beau Vernon scooped up the football one Saturday afternoon at Leongatha seven years ago, he was collected in the head by a Wonthaggi opponent. It wasn’t a big hit, he said, just “wrong angle and wrong time”. He could have added “wrong bloke”, but did not.

“I fell to the ground and knew straight away something was very wrong,” he said.

He could not move his arms or legs. Nor could he feel his limbs when trainers touched them. “That time laying on the ground was the scariest of my life,” he said. Thinking he had broken his neck, he warned teammates, including his younger brother Zak, not to touch him. Less than two hours later, he was in an induced coma in the Alfred hospital. His parents, then on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Africa, flew home in a miserable hurry.

Recently, an Alberta woman with an obvious physical disability was asked to leave a grocery store and not come back because she could not pack her own groceries quickly enough. According to the report on CBC’s Go Public, the checkout clerk said she was slowing down the line as she struggled to bag her groceries, and the store said no staff were available to help her. Presumably, neither were other patrons.

This story is consistent with what many disabled people say they experience. The Human Rights Commission says that almost 60 per cent of all claims cite disability as the basis for discrimination. People with disabilities are routinely denied the rights we all know they are entitled to.