His office at Marsi Bionics, the company he founded to raise funds and develop the prototype he created at the CSIC, has his name, Elena, cut out of colorful cardboard on the door.
It is a gift from one of the children with quadriplegia or muscular atrophy who have tried
Atlas 2030
, the bionic exoskeleton that helps them stand up and strengthen their muscles as part of their lifelong rehabilitation.
In Spain alone, 2,000 children could benefit from its
services
.
The international demand can be huge, he admits, but still, almost, they are celebrating the authorization of the Spanish Medicines Agency to be able to market it in Spain and in the EU.
Lets start by the beginning.
Did they call her a
brainiac
?
Absolutely.
I was never the first class nor did I get license plates.
I am very normal, I have a logical-mathematical and creative intelligence.
As a
brainiac
, nothing.
I would even tell you that for a very long time, perhaps too long, I have greatly underestimated myself.
Intellectually?
Come now.
Yes. I was raised in a family of excellent scientists.
My mother is a doctor in Physics, and my father is a professor of Electromagnetism.
I can develop a concept, arrive at a solution to a problem, but don't ask me a date, I have no memory.
I am the middle of three sisters and at home I was a bit in a no-man's-land.
That makes you strong to overcome difficulties and, at the same time, it creates a shell for you.
Sometimes I worry about being made of stone.
As a child I was very introverted, and I still don't like talking too much, really.
But she sings in a group like a
jazz diva
.
How do you eat that?
It is so wonderful that feeling of expressing what you have inside, the connection with others, the energy that you receive back.
That enjoyment, that euphoria.
Going out on stage is the drink that I go through because of the enormous pleasure that one feels when all that begins to flow.
Is that science too?
Sure, emotions are chemistry.
I always say that everything is mathematics, physics and chemistry.
The body and soul are physical and chemical.
And mathematics is the basis of everything.
They are in nature, in art, in mobiles, in everything.
Explain to me how a girl named Daniela changed your life.
I had been working with walking robots for industry at the CSIC for a long time.
One day the case of Daniela came to us, a girl with quadriplegia.
His parents had come from Córdoba to Madrid to be close to the Toledo tetraplegic hospital, they rented an apartment from an industrialist we worked with and came to see us.
Back then, there were only exoskeletons for adults and no one gave him either options or hope.
There I saw a need, that we had the knowledge and I decided to do applied science and try to solve a specific problem.
What a starfruit.
Total.
It was not easy.
Not everyone agreed, it was not the line we were investigating.
But I have a tremendous flaw: I am very altruistic.
In research, the risk exists and I assumed responsibility, but I was confident, because we had knowledge
Is altruism a defect?
Sometimes there are people who take advantage.
As a child I gave Christmas money to another child who needed it more and I saw the need for this girl.
In research, the risk exists and I took responsibility, but I was confident, because we had knowledge.
Do you believe in yourself so much?
Believing that you are capable is important.
But I was not born with that conviction.
I did not consider myself special, but the heap, and I still do not consider myself.
The key to success is perseverance and tenacity, and talent, yes, but without the other it does not work.
I have been growing in self-esteem.
Was there a key moment?
Yes. Around 40. It had to do with a stage in which I had more social life at my daughters' school.
Perhaps, having always lived in a science environment, where any talent was considered normal, made me think that I was very normal.
At school, other mothers were amazed at the things I did.
And I started to think that maybe this is not so ordinary.
It happened that everything started to take off, and here we are.
I have cried a lot with the children, sometimes out of emotion and sometimes out of frustration
How much have you cried testing the exoskeleton with children?
A lot, and I keep crying.
Sometimes with emotion and sometimes with frustration
Will they ever be able to walk alone with him?
That is the dream and the challenge for the future.
For now we are fighting so that access to the exoskeleton as a rehabilitation instrument in clinical centers is covered by public health, such as medicines.
It is not a luxury: it gives hope and quality of life.
Investigating in Spain is crying?
Unfortunately, many times and a long time.
You have to have a lot of tolerance for frustration and a lot of resilience.
Getting up after each blow, it is very difficult to investigate in Spain.
There are no means, there are no funds and it is not sufficiently recognized either.
As girls my daughters called me a bad mother, now they are proud of me
He has two teenage daughters.
Do you want to
kill
the mother?
Sometimes yes, when they were little.
As children they called me a bad mother because, of course, I was never in school like other moms doing crafts.
I want to believe that that has changed and now they are proud of their mother and want to look like her.
How much does that guilt weigh on your back?
A lot of.
Very much, and it has not happened to me.
It will last a lifetime.
Students from an institute in Jerez have named their center after them.
Brown or pride?
That really is a rush.
You can't imagine what it is that 16-year-old kids, who are into other things, look at you, a woman and a scientist, like a
youtuber.
It is also a responsibility: I want to get involved so that this is a reference center from which scientific-technological vocations emerge without any difference due to gender.
Why are there still fewer girls in those disciplines?
It is a prejudice, a social and cultural problem that comes from the cradle, from the pink and the blue, the doll and the truck and all that.
Is that as cause and effect as it sounds?
Yes, but then there is something: I ask myself questions because I have had two daughters, I have raised them the way they raised me, without any gender prejudice, and I have seen, in them and in other girls, that, at a time of adolescence, there is a drop in self-esteem that coincides with the point at which they have to decide on their career.
Then, as society has been telling them that science majors are for smart and those of letters for fools, they are usually self-dismissed for science.
We should, together, look for an answer to that.
In the meantime, what do you do about it?
I always transmit the same thing to girls and boys.
First: there is no career of clever and foolish, but qualities to dedicate yourself to one thing or another.
In Law, I would have suspended all of them and would not have enjoyed it, I am not made to memorize anything.
It is a question of what your abilities and your tastes are and where you can develop them.
And it is also a question of how we explain science.
Women care more about what for than why.
I don't know if it is innate or cultural.
But science solves problems, and it must be explained that way.
Imagine that you could design a robot to strengthen your weak point, what would it be?
One for the heart.
I'm going to need it.
If somewhere I fail, it is there.
Have we already started with leaks?
No, not those yet, but everything touches me with emotion.
Which musical diva do you admire?
Is it more of Beyoncé or Lady Gaga?
Well look, I could tell you many, alive, dead and foreign.
But Sole Giménez, from Presumed Implicados, fascinates me.
And we have her alive and very close.
ANTIDIVA
The industrial engineer Elena García Armada (Madrid, 50 years old), daughter of a PhD in Physics and a professor of Electromagnetism, was working researching industrial robots at the CSIC when she met a tetraplegic girl and decided to "do applied science and go to health After three years of study for the realization of a prototype, and another eight at Marsi Bionics, the company he founded to raise funds to develop it, he has just received permission to commercialize the world's first child bionic exoskeleton. From time to time , she sings where she is called as the leader of her jazz group, Owl. "Fewer people go to the dissemination talks, but on stage I grow the same or more than on the stage", she confesses.
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