Big names give Rex a boost

"I never thought I'd see this in my lifetime."

So says Professor Michael Thorner, a celebrated physician and professor of internal medicine and neurosurgery in the US, on the invention of Rex.

Thorner has used a wheelchair for 17 years, after suffering a spinal cord injury felling a tree, and intends to wear Rex to work, allowing him to stand up and examine patients again.

He is one of three members of the international advisory board set up by Rex Bionics.

Another, Emmy Award-winning talk-show host Montel Williams, has close links with the American military and sufferers of multiple sclerosis.

The first black marine chosen for the Naval Academy Prep School in Rhode Island, Williams hosted a nationally syndicated TV talk-show on CBS for 17 years. In 1999 he was diagnosed with MS and established a foundation to do further research on it.

"Our young men and women in uniform give so much to our country - sometimes, due to injury, their ability to walk. For our paralysed warriors to be able to look people in the eye at face level - what an achievement," he says.

The third is BBC correspondent Frank Gardner, shot six times at close range by al Qaeda gunmen while filming in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in 2004. Gardner - who has a Kiwi wife, Amanda - now uses a wheelchair.

Rex Bionics CEO Jenny Morel says the advisory board members promote Rex from the user perspective.

"I think that's been a very important ethos in the company from the beginning - that Rex has been developed for real people ... It's been driven by what people want from Rex."