Volunteers, Donations Needed to Build House for Disabled Veteran

The State (Feb. 3, 2011)- On Sept. 21, 2005, Staff Sgt. Ronell Bradley, then 26 years old, gave two legs and part of a hand for his country when the Humvee he was riding in was hit by a roadside bomb.

Bradley was on his third deployment — twice to Iraq and once to Bosnia — as an engineer, clearing bombs so other soldiers would be safer.

“It blew off my right leg and turned my left leg into spaghetti,” said Bradley, now assistant chief of prosthetics at Columbia’s Dorn VA Medical Center. “It set off the ammunition in my weapon, and that blew up in my hands.”
Now, donations and volunteers — both tradesmen and regular folks — are needed to build Bradley a brand-new, handicapped-accessible home at Lake Carolina, through the Homes for Our Troops program. The Massachusetts-based nonprofit has built 90 homes for severely disabled veterans across the country since 2004 and has committed to building 100 more.

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Computational Model of Swimming Fish Could Inspire Design of Robots or Medical Prosthetics

ScienceDaily (Oct. 18, 2010) — Scientists at the University of Maryland and Tulane University have developed a computational model of a swimming fish that is the first to address the interaction of both internal and external forces on locomotion. The interdisciplinary research team simulated how the fish's flexible body bends, depending on both the forces from the fluid moving around it as well as the muscles inside. Understanding these interactions, even in fish, will help design medical prosthetics for humans that work with the body's natural mechanics, rather than against them.

Understanding the general principles of animal movement could help to design and inspire engineered systems, including robots and medical prosthetics. This simulation was developed for the lamprey, a primitive vertebrate whose nervous system is being used as a model by Cohen and colleagues to develop prosthetic devices for people with spinal cord injuries.

"The devices may one day help people regain control over their legs and walk again," Cohen said. "We understand to first order the neural circuit that controls the muscles for swimming or walking. Now, for neuroprosthetics, we need to understand how the muscles interact with the body and the environment -- our model helps us do that."

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Thought-Controlled Prosthetic Limb System to Be Tested on Human Subjects

ScienceDaily (Aug. 4, 2010) — "The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded a contract for up to $34.5 million to The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., to manage the development and testing of the Modular Prosthetic Limb (MPL) system on human subjects, using a brain-controlled interface."

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