An innovator working with athletes and patients

Do we have false limitations on our bodies? Can our muscles go extra miles even when our brain is telling them to stop? Can the hearing-impaired experience music? Can pain be a phantom thing? Can we, in a line, retrain our physical realities?

From Olympic athletes, professional football players, high altitude cyclists, surfers, Navy Seals and elite military personnel to people recovering from stroke, spinal cord, and traumatic brain injury – there’s a common concern that binds all of rehabilitation expert David Putrino’s work: when our bodies hit seemingly impossible walls, can technology open a door? How can it be used to empower, inform, and change lives. Dramatically improve standards of care. Take human performance to the absolute limit.?

Putrino’s journey goes all the way back to when he was just 18 months old. He experienced a seizure that left him in a coma for three days. When he woke, doctors told his parents that he would never recover full use of the left side of his body. But they refused to give up. And Putrino made a full recovery.

Armed with degrees in computational neuroscience from Harvard, MIT, and NYU, and currently Director of Rehabilitation Innovation at Mount Sinai in New York, where he also runs his fascinatingly diverse Putrino Labs, he’s now helping others reclaim or improve their lives.

Brain stimulation for athletes to push their boundaries. Virtual reality to treat chronic pain. Wearable technologies to enable people living with Parkinson’s. Video games to improve outcomes of people affected with paralysis. Telemedicine technology for concussion detection in high contact sport. Putrino is immersed in harnessing breakthrough technologies and pioneering novel approaches for performance enhancement and rehabilitation.

He is also ‘Chief Mad Scientist’ at ‘Not Impossible Labs’ – a technology incubator whose mission is self-evident in its name. Collaborating with them, among other interventions, Putrino has traveled illegally to war-torn South Sudan to provide 3D printed prosthetic arms for victims of the conflict, and pioneered wearables that enable the deaf to experience music.

He was also amongst the first who rang the bell on long Covid, throwing light on the debilitating long-term effects of Covid. “An emergency that won’t end,” in his words.

Uniquely, he regularly collaborates with artists, musicians and other creators in his search for pioneering technologies. Rigid, rule-following, incremental research, he believes, is only one building block of science. “True discovery & innovation come from places of creativity. If you want to be a true scientist, you need to look in all directions and leave no stone unturned in your approach,” he says.

At SYNAPSE, the technologist healer spoke of the plasticity of the brain and his myriad experiences in taking science to its limits to treat, heal, and empower.

Written by: Himanshu Arya | Edited by: Ritika Passi

Watch David Putrino's riveting presentation, and an equally fascinating conversation thereafter, only at SYNAPSE: https://youtu.be/tQM8aqiRhSw?si=kCmD9pp0E9_nOuvt