All Mark Pollock Blogs

Yesterday I was rolling around Alcatraz in my wheelchair, today I entered the HQ of Ekso Bionics (www.eksobionics.com) to try and walk. I’m just south of San Francisco in the university town of Berkeley and I’m here to try out a robotic exoskeleton called Ekso. As I...

We’ve been back from Project Walk for nearly 3 months now and I’m balancing training in hospital with Project Walk training in my old university, Trinity College Dublin. I’m training between 12 and 18 hours per week at the moment and this video shows me getting right...

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDvDgysmKLs] Today, I tested a device called a Brainport. It allows blind people to perceive objects using a camera mounted on glasses which sends the image to an electrode held on the tongue. The tongue receives the pixels of...

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKfuEvInPzs] The above video shows me trying squats at a walking frame, while the one below is me doing squats on a Total Gym. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtH0Z4Z93h4]   Working my paralysed legs over the past...

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6RfGweMWGE] Above is a video of my recent walking simulation at project walk. The theory is that if i want to get any feeling or movement back in my legs then I better try and use them. The video captures my first walking...

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_X7vq0Tc14&NR=1] Check out a video of my first faltering strokes on a rowing ergometer at Project Walk. I thought that rowing without the use of my legs would be a complete waste of time but, with the set up improvised by...

Apart from the usual blog articles, Simone and I are experimenting with video and audio during the next month at Project Walk. The following link  is our first video taken on an Iphone and uploaded directly to YouTube. I’ll try to get some audio podcasts up here also...

We're on a ten lane freeway in California. The sun is shining through the window, hot on my face, Simone is driving and I am buzzing. I just spent two and a half hours at Project Walk (www.projectwalk.org)  trying to move sleeping muscles that have been under the grip...

Running at dawn on a silent Copacabana beach. Land sailing the Pampas of Barreal, at the foot of the Andes mountains. Snowboarding high in the Swiss Alps. Cross country skiing through Norwegian snow fields. Offshore yacht racing on an angry Atlantic Ocean.These...

Another 4 a.m. start to the week. It doesn't seem to matter if I take the sleeping tablets or not - I wake early in the morning. For three and a half months I have dreaded going to sleep at night knowing that I will face the lonely hours between waking up and the day...