Monday's progress and pictures

Today was another productive day. After hearing great news from last week, we met with Mirna, her sister and her physical therapist (Olga) this afternoon to review her progress and also to address some concerns presented by Gabriella in terms of horizontal movement and settings.

We met in the afternoon and after a quick greeting, we began with the exercises. It was amazing to see how much control Mirna now has on the horizontal direction and how she has been able to gain much more control of the mouse. We have found the ideal settings in terms of gain and damping and we will continue to use those settings in all sessions. The only problem was presented when we asked her to move the mouse on the vertical direction since we would not detect any signals coming to the EE system. We did everything we could including repositioning the electrodes, applying more conductive gel, cleaning the contact areas from any moisture, testing the electrodes on another person (Julio), etc, but we could not see much more movement on the LEDs on the system. For a moment it was a little bit frustrating, but only to us, since we could not see any sign of frustration on Mirna's part (shows how patient she is compared to the rest of us). We even contacted Doctor Gips at Boston College for assistance, but while waiting for his response, we decided to test the right eye (she has been using the left eye since according to Gabriella, it is the one where Mirna has much more control) and immediately when we did this, she gained full control of the system again. It was very encouraging to see her moving the mouse in all directions (see video) and we were all, once again, having a great time with Mirna. We also adjusted her wheelchair to be in a straight line with the monitor given that she is only able to incline it to a fixed degree.

We asked for permission to take pictures (even a video) and her family accepted without any concern and said that they would want others to be motivated by Mirna's story and have no problems sharing the pictures.


We will reconvene on Wednesday to begin using the software application and in order for Mirna to gain more accurate control of the system. We will move into a more stringent schedule this week while monitoring her diligently to avoid exhaustion.

Please meet Mirna Ramos, her sister Gabriella (left), my friend Julio (right) and yours truly (center).

Mirna using the Eagles Eyes System

Gabriella Ramos and Mirna Ramos

The final setup (Laptop, monitor, EE system, mouse and UPS)

We will have some pictures of our beautiful Huehuetenango in our next post.

Mirna using the EE system Video (right to left and up and down)

God bless.