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The pandemic put a pause on most things, but not on innovation. It rather gave a push to technological advancements and refinements in health care, making it better, quicker and cheaper

- Pooja Biraia Jaiswal

In September 2017, Lt Col Amar Dehal of Rashtriya Rifles was shot twice during a terrorist attack in Kashmir's Shopian district. One bullet hit him in the head-it went in through the right lobe and got lodged in the left; the other scraped through his abdomen. A physically fit, tall and broad-chested Dehal was suddenly bed-ridden and on life support. The entry wound in his skull was closed with an acrylic plate, but the left side remained pulpy to the touch. For eight months, the camera-friendly, guitar-loving 35-year-old was in a coma. Once he was out of it, he was wheelchair-bound, unable to perform the most basic tasks.

This November 1, at the neurorehabilitation department of Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani hospital in Mumbai, a cheerful Dehal, assisted by a robot, walked for the very first time in five years. It was "as if he was a baby who was just discovering the pleasures of stretching his legs and learning how to walk from the very beginning," says his wife Sheela, also a lieutenant colonel. She is on a long hiatus to be with her husband.

Dehal was seen moving his lower limbs to and fro on a Locomat-a moving mat similar to an automated treadmill-wherein a robotic exoskeleton provides guidance and bodyweight support to facilitate intensive walking training and physiological gait rehabilitation for severely impaired neurological patients. For the next 10 days thereafter, he walked close to 7,000 steps. Egging him on was a video game-enabled screen that rewarded him with jackpots on achieving his milestones.