The £90,000 ‘robolegs’ that got me out of my wheelchair: How one woman stood on her own feet nine years after she was paralysed

It is an extraordinary sight. From the waist up, 27-year-old Sophie Morgan is every inch the pretty blonde girl-next-door. But from the waist down, with her legs encased in £90,000 of motorised carbon-fibre, she is RoboCop.

Sophie’s thumb manipulates a joystick built into the armrests of her suit, causing the legs to hiss and whirr into life, before she takes three slow but sure steps. Her face breaks into a broad grin.

Five minutes earlier, Sophie was in her wheelchair. She was left paralysed from the chest down in a car crash nine years ago that shattered her spine. Over the years, Sophie, an aspiring television presenter who appeared in Channel 4’s Paralympics coverage, had come to accept that she would never walk again.