Ten Years Waiting, Then Walking Again: One Army Veteran's Return to His Feet

For nearly a decade, Richard “Richie” Neider talked to people from a wheelchair. In September 2022, he told a Phoenix television station what it meant to be “eye-to-eye with everybody” again.

The Army veteran had just learned to walk in a ReWalk Personal 6.0, a battery-powered robotic exoskeleton that braces the legs and moves the hips and knees. He had spent two months learning to use it at Touchstone Rehabilitation, 12News reported. Then he took it home.

“After 10 years of not walking. It’s one of the most amazing feelings,” Neider told the Phoenix station.

His story, first covered by local television and later by Newsweek, also shows how a paralyzed veteran actually gets a personal exoskeleton in the United States: through a Department of Veterans Affairs policy that took years to build, a clinic willing to do the training, and a long wait that many veterans are still in.

An IED in Iraq, and a second loss years later

Neider was injured in 2005 during Operation Iraqi Freedom, when an improvised explosive device damaged his spinal cord. “During Operation Iraqi Freedom I sustained a spinal cord injury that took my walking away,” he told 12News.

The loss did not come all at once. According to Arizona’s Family (3TV/CBS 5), he lost his ability to walk because of scar tissue complications in 2013, eight years after the blast. From then on he used a wheelchair.

12News described the years that followed plainly. Life in a wheelchair was a big adjustment, the station reported, and the Army veteran learned to adapt, believing he would never walk again.

He kept riding. Neider told Arizona’s Family he had been building and riding motorcycles since he was seven years old, and that he had specially engineered a motorcycle for himself.

How the ReWalk works

The ReWalk is a wearable frame. The battery-operated unit is strapped to the user’s lower back, and the legs are attached to braces at the ankles and knees, 12News reported. Neider wore a watch that initiated his actions, and a device on his hip monitored his movements.

The walking itself is triggered by the body. “Each time they shift side to side the exoskeleton knows to advance the other limb,” his physical therapist, Dan Bonaroti, told 12News. (The station spelled his surname Bonarati; Arizona’s Family and Newsweek spelled it Bonaroti.)

Newsweek described the same mechanism from the manufacturer’s side: the device detects shifts in the user’s center of gravity, a forward lean starts the first step, and battery-powered motors at the hip and knee joints move the legs in a natural gait.

Neider was candid about who does the work. “The machine is doing all the work of moving me around. I just basically make it go where it’s supposed to go,” he told 12News.

Bonaroti, who owns Touchstone Rehabilitation, told 12News that people the clinic had trained could walk “an hour or more at a time,” and that he believed some had done walking races in the device. He also explained to Arizona’s Family why the power pack does not drag on the wearer: “everything is formed to his body,” he said, and the exoskeleton takes the impact of that weight away.

The ReWalk was developed in Israel by Amit Goffer, a researcher who has been paralyzed since 1997, according to Medical Device and Diagnostic Industry. In June 2014 it became the first wearable, motorized device cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to help people with paraplegia walk, through the FDA’s de novo process. The company that makes it, ReWalk Robotics, formally changed its name to Lifeward in September 2024. The ReWalk Exoskeleton remains part of its product line.

The VA policy that put it in his home

Neider did not buy the exoskeleton. The VA did.

Newsweek reported that he was the first Phoenix veteran to take home a ReWalk through the VA program, which fully paid for the $75,000 device. Veterans in the program are trained over 28 sessions and then allowed to take the device home for a brief rental period before a purchase decision, Newsweek reported.

Bonaroti described the arrangement to Arizona’s Family as a trial that lets veterans test the fit before the government commits. “It allows them to try it and actually see if it’s good for them,” he said. If it works, the VA can buy one. Of Neider, he said: “He’s breaking new ground for our program that ReWalk has established throughout the country, but Phoenix has kind of been a leader in that, in making ReWalk accessible to them.”

That program traces to December 2015. That month, the VA issued a national policy for the evaluation, training and procurement of ReWalk Personal exoskeletons for qualifying veterans with spinal cord injury, according to the company’s announcement, which called it the first national coverage policy in the United States for people with spinal cord injuries. Under that policy, veterans could be evaluated at one of the VA’s 24 spinal cord injury centers, referred for training if they met the physical criteria, and considered for a personal unit after completing training successfully.

In June 2018 the VA revised the policy. According to ReWalk’s release on the revision, evaluations still run through the 24 designated spinal cord injury centers, but qualified veterans can now train at the hub center, at a VA hospital in the hub-and-spoke network, or at a private rehabilitation clinic through the Veterans Choice Program. The company said the policy applies to veterans whether their injury was service-related or not.

Touchstone, where Neider trained, is a private physical therapy practice in Phoenix.

“The mental side of it”

Neider said the hardest part of paralysis was not physical.

The biggest disability is not my inability to walk, but the way I was looking at things. It was the mental side of it.

Richard Neider, to Arizona’s Family

“Once I figured that out, I was able to just start moving forward and realize I can do everything everybody else is doing. I just do it a little bit differently,” he told the station.

Research backs up how heavy that mental load can be. A 2008 study in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry surveyed 443 adults with spinal cord injuries living in the community in Victoria, Australia. Nearly half, 48.5 percent, had mental health problems: depression (37 percent), anxiety (30 percent), clinical-level stress (25 percent) or post-traumatic stress disorder (8.4 percent).

The researchers found the probability of emotional disorders was at least twice that of the general population, and that 60 percent of those with one disorder also had another. Better health and more time since injury were associated with lower risk.

No study cited here shows that an exoskeleton treats depression, and none of the reporting on Neider claims it did. What he described was narrower and more personal. “It’s more than freedom. It’s complete independence to be on my feet. Be eye-to-eye with everybody. I can be a stand-up guy again,” he told 12News.

Back out into the real world

On the day he took the device home, Neider talked about using it outside the clinic. “I’m now getting to go out to the real world with it other than just training and simulating it,” he told Arizona’s Family. “Now I’m the stand-up guy!”

He also said the body had not forgotten. “You don’t forget how to walk, your brain always tells you,” he said.

Neider told 12News he was looking forward to walks around the neighborhood with his wife. He told Arizona’s Family that she had been his driving force for the past decade.

He had a bigger plan, too. Neider said he intended to carry the ReWalk in his motorcycle’s sidecar on a ride to Sturgis with fellow combat veterans the following year. “I’ll have legs and be able to walk with everybody instead of rolling with everybody!” he told the station.

A ReWalk is not a Wandercraft

Walk For A Hero funds Wandercraft exoskeletons, and the device in Neider’s story is a different machine. The distinction matters to any veteran weighing options.

The ReWalk is used with crutches. According to the FDA’s description reported by Medical Device and Diagnostic Industry, crutches give the user additional stability when walking, standing and rising from a chair. That means the wearer needs enough upper-body strength and hand function to manage them.

Wandercraft’s devices balance themselves. The company describes its rehabilitation exoskeleton, Atalante X, as fully self-balancing and hands-free, with no need for walkers or crutches, which it says opens access to people with limited upper-body strength. The FDA’s 510(k) database lists a clearance for Atalante X dated December 13, 2023.

On August 11, 2026, the FDA cleared Wandercraft’s personal exoskeleton, Eve, the company announced. Eve is cleared for eligible adults with spinal cord injuries at any level who can operate its remote, for use on level indoor surfaces and adjoining level outdoor areas such as patios, under the supervision of a specially trained companion. Wandercraft said clinical trials supporting the clearance were led by the James J. Peters VA Medical Center in the Bronx and Kessler Foundation in New Jersey, and that a service-disabled veteran-owned distributor, USVetServ, will supply Eve and Atalante X to VA facilities.

Neither device is a cure, and neither replaces a wheelchair. Wandercraft itself says Eve is designed to complement the wheelchair, not replace it.

The wait is the problem

The technology Neider used was cleared by the FDA in 2014. The VA’s national policy arrived in December 2015. He took his device home in September 2022, nearly a decade after he stopped walking.

Walk For A Hero was founded to shorten waits like that. 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. Supporters raise it 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. Cards are charged only when the walker completes the 15 miles. 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.

Neider summed up what he got back when he spoke to Arizona’s Family on the day he took the device home. “Now I’m the stand-up guy!”

For how the newer self-balancing devices differ, read our explainer on the Wandercraft exoskeleton and its FDA clearances, and for another veteran's path back, Air Force veteran Ignacio Montoya's story.

Sources

• 12News (KPNX), “‘I can be a stand-up guy again’: Valley veteran regains ability to walk with new technology,” September 2022
• Arizona’s Family (3TV/CBS 5), “Phoenix veteran in wheelchair walking again thanks to robotic exoskeleton,” September 12, 2022
• Newsweek, “Arizona Veteran Paralyzed in Iraq Walks in Exoskeleton: ‘Amazing Feeling,’” September 14, 2022
• Touchstone Rehabilitation, “Valley veteran regains ability to walk with new technology,” September 16, 2022
• ReWalk Robotics, “U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Issues National Coverage Policy for ReWalk Robotics Exoskeleton Systems,” December 17, 2015
• ReWalk Robotics via BioSpace, “U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Expands Access to ReWalk Exoskeletons for Paralyzed Veterans with Revised National Policy,” July 20, 2018
• Medical Device and Diagnostic Industry, “An Exoskeleton First: FDA Clears ReWalk,” June 27, 2014
• Lifeward via BioSpace, “ReWalk Robotics Ltd. Finalizes Corporate Name Change to Lifeward Ltd.,” September 12, 2024
• Migliorini C, Tonge B, Taleporos G, “Spinal cord injury and mental health,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 2008
• Wandercraft, “Wandercraft Receives FDA Clearance for Eve,” August 11, 2026
• Wandercraft, “Air Force Veteran Uses Advanced Exoskeleton Training to Reclaim Upright Movement,” February 23, 2026
• U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 510(k) Premarket Notification K232077, Atalante X
• Veterans Crisis Line