Operate a piano pedal with the mouth
Friday, October 24, 2008 - 09:35
in Health & Medicine
A wish could come true for paraplegics who play the piano and are paralyzed from the hips down: the Heidelberg researcher Dr.-Ing. Rüdiger Rupp has developed a method with which a pianist can operate the right pedal of a concert grand wirelessly - a first in the world. A paraplegic pianist can thus overcome the handicap of being able to play the piano using only his arms and hands. Dr. Rupp, director of the research department at the spinal cord injury unit of the Orthopedic Clinic of Heidelberg University Hospital (Director: Prof. Dr. Hans Jürgen Gerner), was honored for this invention with € 15,000 from the Innovation Award 2008 of the German Paraplegic Foundation (DSQ).