I'm a 27 year old male with Cerebral Palsy (spastic diplegia). I'm also a biomedical engineer and a registered patent agent. In 2004, while with a law firm in Virginia, I worked on the patents for the ATM2, both in the U.S. and abroad. Nowadays, I run my own practice in CA.
Over the course of my life, I've been in and out of physical therapy, and I've become intimately familiar with most of the techniques and most of the equipment that's used. On a good day, I can look around a physical therapy studio and tell you whose posture is wrong, who isn't isolating a muscle group properly, etc.
As most of you probably know, the problem with spastic CP is that the muscles, particularly the leg muscles, are very tight. Enormous amounts of energy are wasted doing useless work against gravity. Typically, tight as they are, the muscles are also weak. In my case, there's quite a gait pathology. The problem with stretching and strengthening my muscles is that it's very difficult to isolate a particular muscle to work on it because my body will involve any muscle it can in an effort to generate movement.
I just started up with a new round of PT recently at a new studio. The therapist took me to their general exercise area and told me that there was something relatively new that she wanted to try on me. She led me to the machine and started to explain, but I was nearly doubled over in laughter before she got more than a sentence out. There, standing before me, was a BackProject ATM2. She strapped me in.
It took me a moment to explain exactly why I was laughing, and how it was that I was so familiar with a machine that I'd never used before. Once I got over the fact that I was being "tortured" using a machine that I helped to patent, I noticed that it really does work. I'm able to exercise my hip abductors and gluteus muscles without trunk involvement and without my posture and stability wavering.
Andrew McAleavey, Registered Patent Agent