Some 70 bionic athletes and their engineering teams gathered near Zurich yesterday for the world’s first “Cybathlon”, an international competition designed for disabled people with high-tech assistive devices.
Participants in the Cybathlon championships used advanced prosthetics, wheelchairs and electrical stimuli from their brains in six different disciplines modelled on everyday tasks.
In the competition’s exoskeleton race, paraplegic athletes were tasked to walk through an obstacle course with the help of wearable motorised support systems that mimic their muscles.
In the cycling event, paralysed competitors pedalled around a track with the help of artificial electric stimuli that trigger their leg muscles.
Meanwhile, a brain-computer interface race took place inside the heads of athletes, whose animated versions of themselves danced, slid and jumped through a virtual parkour, steered by willpower.
The championship in Kloten near Zurich was organised by ETH Zurich University to boost the development of bionic devices.
“What’s the use of an exoskeleton that lets you walk again, but whose battery lasts less than a day and that is too clunky to step into a car?” he told Swiss news agency sda.
The Cybathlon featured several champion athletes, including Japan’s Tomoya Ito, who raced his wheelchair to two gold medals at the 2008 Beijing Paralympics and Iceland’s Helgi Sveinsson, a former javelin world champion and two-time Paralympian.