This year the Technical Conferences, opened by Ms. Neus Munté, vice-chair of the Government of Catalonia and Dr. Josep M. Ramírez, managing director of the Institut Guttmann, have received exceptionally the most important congresses of specialists in spinal cord injury; the XXII National Conferences of the Spanish Society of Paraplegia (SEP) and the XXI Symposium of the Spanish Association of Skilled Nursing in the Injured Spinal Cord (ASELME).

In addition for the first time they have met also the group of physiotherapists and occupational therapists, in the First Conferences of Technology and Functional Rehabilitation, and the associations of persons with disabilities, in the third and last day of the initiative taken throughout this year by the associations that are part of the Social Council and Participation of Institut Guttmann, "Conferences of Social Innovation and Disability: debates of disability in a changing society".

All the four conferences were attended in a large number of participants, and especially with a strong participation. The presentations of communications and posters, in medicine and nursing, the practical workshops conducted by the physiotherapists, and the discussion group in which people affected by disabilities of neurological origin could discuss about innovative responses in relation to the personal autonomy, highlighted the importance of the different agents involved in the rehabilitation process.

Particularly interesting the lecture, common to all attendees, by Gregoire Courtine, French researcher at the Ecole Polytechnique Fedérale of Lausanne (Swiss) who leads a group of European researchers that achieved the recovery of mobility in rats with spinal cord injury. Courtine explained the possibility of replicate in humans the experiment conducted in rats and primates, what by an electrical and chemical stimulation at spinal level and technological support of an antigravity system, could achieve that people with an incomplete spinal cord injury recover faster and better the driving capability.

Also the lecture about female sexuality after a spinal cord injury. The Scientifics Frédérique Courtois of the University of Quebec (Montreal) and Alexander Sipski of the Medical University of Alabama (Birmingham), that working from clinical research, presented the issue from the point of view of the recovery of a full sexual health.