12 Years After Paralysis, an Air Force Veteran Is Standing Again

Ignacio Montoya was three weeks from starting Air Force pilot training when a motorcycle crash in 2012 left him paralyzed from the chest down. A doctor gave him a 1% chance of regaining any mobility, function or sensation.

More than a dozen years later, Montoya is a doctoral student in biomedical engineering, and he is also the subject of his own research. At the Society for Neuroscience’s 2025 annual meeting, held in November, he presented a poster reporting that years of non-invasive spinal cord stimulation, paired with intensive training in robotic exoskeletons, coincided with gains in stepping control, muscle activity, bladder sensation, bowel function and other measures.

Wandercraft, maker of the Atalante exoskeleton he trained in, publicized the results in February 2026.

The findings come from a single person and have not been published in a peer-reviewed journal. They still add to a growing body of research suggesting that a spinal cord long considered permanently silent after a “complete” injury may retain some capacity to respond, and they show how much daily work that response can take.

A fighter pilot’s slot, given away

Montoya was born in Cuba. In a 2024 interview with the Society for Neuroscience’s Neuroscience Quarterly, he said his mother died of leukemia when he was four, after the family won a visa lottery that came too late for her treatment. Georgia Tech reported that he and his father immigrated to the United States when he was 6.

He told Neuroscience Quarterly that he completed four years of military officer training and was chosen as one of five airmen in his unit for undergraduate pilot training. Three weeks before that training began, as a newly commissioned second lieutenant, he crashed.

The injuries were severe: a complete spinal cord injury, a complete injury to the nerves of his right arm (the brachial plexus), and a traumatic brain injury that left him in a coma for three months, he said. Georgia Tech reported that he flatlined for 15 minutes.

“Someone ran a red light,” Montoya told FOX 5 Atlanta. (The station dated the crash to 2013; Georgia Tech and the Society for Neuroscience both give 2012.)

What hurt most, he told the station, was losing the cockpit. “My pilot slot had to be given to someone else. That I could no longer be a pilot, a fighter pilot which was my dream.”

When I had the spinal cord injury, it was like the war that I’d been preparing for all my life came to me.

Ignacio Montoya, Neuroscience Quarterly

The prognosis did not frighten him off. “The doctor gave me a 1% chance of ever walking again. That’s all I needed,” he told Neuroscience Quarterly.

From patient to investigator

Montoya found that a “complete” diagnosis closed doors. Because his injury was complete, he said, he did not qualify for therapies that could address it, and most research he found was aimed at incomplete, recent injuries.

So he went looking. He began as a research participant with Monica Perez on transcutaneous spinal electrical stimulation, then joined the lab of neurobiologist V. Reggie Edgerton in December 2019, he told Neuroscience Quarterly. Edgerton is a pioneer of spinal stimulation research.

He earned a master’s degree from Georgia Tech in 2018 and a second master’s in kinesiology from Cal State LA. In 2025 he began a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering through the joint Georgia Tech and Emory University program, advised by Cassie Mitchell, an associate professor who is herself quadriplegic, Georgia Tech reported.

“My experience as a research participant gives me a unique perspective as I transition into a doctoral researcher,” he told the university.

He put it more bluntly to FOX 5 Atlanta: “My body is the lab.”

What the study did

The poster Montoya presented, “Transcutaneous Spinal Neuromodulation Combined with Task-Specific Training Restores Sensorimotor and Autonomic Function After 12 Years of Clinically Complete SCI,” lists Montoya and Mitchell of Georgia Tech, Edgerton and colleagues at Rancho Research Institute in Downey, California, as authors.

It describes a longitudinal single-case study running from 2020 to the present. The subject is a man with a chronic complete spinal cord injury at the T4 to T5 level, more than 12 years post-injury, classified AIS-A, the most severe grade, with an additional right brachial plexus avulsion.

He trained three times a week. Electrodes on the skin at three levels of the spine (C5/C6, T11/T12 and L1/L2) delivered transcutaneous spinal cord stimulation, a non-invasive technique that requires no surgery. During stimulation he did high-repetition training: more than 274 sessions of exoskeleton-assisted walking over ground, therapist-assisted treadmill stepping, sit-to-stand practice and a recumbent elliptical.

Two exoskeletons were used, according to the poster: the Ekso Bionics NR and the Wandercraft Atalante. The key variable was how much the robot helped. The team reduced robotic assistance in steps of 5 to 10 percent, from 100 percent down to roughly 55 to 45 percent, to force more of the effort to come from him.

Montoya explained the logic in Wandercraft’s announcement. “We’ve focused on pairing neuromodulation with training that requires active participation,” he said. “As robotic assistance is gradually reduced, the task becomes progressively more demanding while maintaining stability. That shift from being moved to actively engaging is where adaptation begins.”

What the poster reports

The poster reports that he achieved stepping in the exoskeleton at 55 percent robot assistance. In the Atalante at 60 percent assistance, his gait cycle was more consistent when he gave maximal effort, and activity in his calf muscle (the soleus) rose significantly compared with full assistance.

The poster also lists changes beyond walking. Over 2022, his functional bladder capacity rose from 50 to 250 milliliters and he showed the ability to sense when his bladder was full. The time needed for his bowel program fell and stayed stable. Bone density scans showed an 11.5 percent increase at the left hip, which the authors say reversed osteopenia there to normal.

Other listed changes include steadier blood pressure, better temperature regulation, fewer urinary tract infections, reduced pain and spasticity, and improved mood.

“This has been a true team effort,” Montoya said in Wandercraft’s release.

Montoya has gone further in describing his own status. “My injury is no longer considered complete, and I believe I’m the first person to achieve that through a combination of spinal stimulation, intensive training, and daily weight-bearing rehabilitation,” he told Georgia Tech. That is his assessment. The poster still classifies the subject’s injury as AIS-A, and none of the reports reviewed here include an independent reclassification.

Why a “complete” injury may not be the end

For decades, the poster notes, a clinically complete spinal cord injury has been defined as a permanent loss of control from the brain. Montoya’s work challenges that definition, and it builds on 15 years of research.

In 2011 a University of Louisville team, with Edgerton among the authors, reported in The Lancet on a 23-year-old man with motor complete paraplegia who received an implanted epidural stimulator over the lower spinal cord. With stimulation, he achieved full weight-bearing standing with assistance only for balance, and seven months after implantation he regained voluntary control of some leg movements, but only while the stimulator was on. The authors suggested training with stimulation might reactivate “previously silent spared neural circuits.”

Montoya’s approach uses electrodes on the skin rather than a surgical implant. In December 2024 the FDA granted de novo authorization to ONWARD Medical’s ARC-EX system, the first non-invasive spinal cord stimulation system for people with spinal cord injuries, IEEE Pulse reported.

The pivotal trial behind it, published in Nature Medicine in 2024, enrolled 60 people with chronic cervical spinal cord injuries. Seventy-two percent improved beyond the minimally important difference in both strength and function, and no serious adverse events related to the therapy were reported. The trial was in people with incomplete injuries, not complete injuries like Montoya’s, and its investigators disclosed financial ties to ONWARD.

Montoya described the principle to Georgia Tech. “Neuromodulation creates a bridge of signals that helps the remaining intact nerve fibers below the injury communicate with each other, enhancing neuroplasticity within the system,” he said.

What the results do not show

This is one person, studied over several years, reported on a conference poster. There is no control group. The subject is also an investigator. A single-case design can show what is possible for one body; it cannot show how often it happens or for whom.

The intervention also bundled stimulation, two exoskeletons, treadmill and elliptical work, and weight-bearing practice, three days a week for years. Neuroscience Quarterly reported that as of 2024 he had taken more than 400,000 steps in an exoskeleton while receiving stimulation. The poster does not separate the effect of any single piece.

And none of it means Montoya walks unaided. FOX 5 Atlanta reported that his long-term goal is to develop treatments that could one day let people with paralysis, himself included, walk again without assistance.

The person behind him

Those hundreds of thousands of steps had company. Montoya told Neuroscience Quarterly that his wife, Hilda, became a research assistant and a physical therapy assistant trained on exoskeletons so she could be the one who helps him walk.

“She walks behind me every time I take a step in an exoskeleton,” he said. “So those 400,000 steps have also been taken by her.”

What it means for veterans

Wandercraft’s chief executive, Matthieu Masselin, credited the people. “Atalante X is a tool, but it’s individuals like Ignacio, and the clinicians and researchers around him, who show us all what’s possible when innovation is guided by human determination,” he said.

The FDA cleared Atalante X through the 510(k) process in December 2023, according to the agency’s database. On August 11, 2026, the FDA cleared Wandercraft’s personal exoskeleton, Eve, for eligible adults with spinal cord injuries at any level, for supervised use at home, the company announced. Wandercraft said the clinical trials behind that clearance were led by the James J. Peters VA Medical Center in the Bronx and Kessler Foundation in New Jersey, and that USVetServ, a service-disabled veteran-owned business, will distribute Eve and Atalante X to VA facilities.

Clearance is not the same as access. Over 20,000 people have medically qualified for exoskeleton technology in the last decade, and Walk For A Hero’s goal is to fund approximately 100.

The foundation funds a full package for each hero: a Wandercraft exoskeleton, five years of maintenance, travel and therapy, at $150,000. One of its campaigns is for Joshua L. Holm, who deployed to Iraq from 2003 to 2004 and was left paralyzed by combat-related injuries. He has tried a Wandercraft exoskeleton in a session at Walk In New York; the campaign funds one of his own.

Supporters raise the money on foot. A walker covers 15 miles at their own pace while a phone records the miles by GPS, and backers pledge $1 to $100 per mile, charged only when the walker finishes all 15. Ten backers at $5 a mile raise $750 on one walk, and 200 such walks fund one package. Every dollar designated to a hero’s campaign funds that hero’s package.

Montoya was told his odds were 1%. His study cannot say what the odds are for anyone else. It does show a veteran, 12 years into paralysis, still training three days a week, with his wife one step behind him.

Read our explainer on how the Wandercraft exoskeleton works and how Army veteran Richie Neider walked again with a ReWalk.

Sources

• Wandercraft, “Air Force Veteran Uses Advanced Exoskeleton Training to Reclaim Upright Movement, 12 Years After Paralysis,” February 23, 2026
• Montoya I, Mitchell C, Edgerton V, et al., “Transcutaneous Spinal Neuromodulation Combined with Task-Specific Training Restores Sensorimotor and Autonomic Function After 12 Years of Clinically Complete SCI,” Society for Neuroscience poster, 2025 (PDF hosted by Wandercraft)
• Georgia Tech, “Stepping Into the Future: A Paralyzed Veteran Returns to Georgia Tech for His Ph.D.,” August 5, 2025
• Society for Neuroscience, Neuroscience Quarterly, “Future of Neuroscience: Ignacio Montoya,” Spring 2024
• FOX 5 Atlanta, “Paralyzed Air Force veteran develops self-balancing exoskeleton at Georgia Tech,” November 11, 2025
• Harkema S, et al., “Effect of epidural stimulation of the lumbosacral spinal cord on voluntary movement, standing, and assisted stepping after motor complete paraplegia: a case study,” The Lancet, 2011
• Moritz C, et al., “Non-invasive spinal cord electrical stimulation for arm and hand function in chronic tetraplegia: a safety and efficacy trial,” Nature Medicine, 2024
• IEEE Pulse, “FDA-Cleared Noninvasive Spine Stimulation System Could Transform Spinal Cord Injury Treatment,” August 5, 2025
• Wandercraft, “Wandercraft Receives FDA Clearance for Eve,” August 11, 2026
• U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 510(k) Premarket Notification K232077, Atalante X