How often do HERL researchers work directly with veterans? What kind of impact do they bring to your research lab?

Every day pretty much. They’re at the core of our research. We involve veterans at all levels: obviously, myself as a director; we have veterans as research participants; we have veterans on our design teams; we have veterans as graduate and undergraduate students working in our center; we have veterans as investigators in our center. We even collect information from veterans through social media as well, like MySpace and YouTube, to make sure that we are as connected to veterans as we can be through all mechanisms.

We’re also actively involved in the VA clinics here in Pittsburgh; consulting to the spinal cord injury and polytrauma clinics across the country; working closely with the VA Prosthetics and Sensory Aid Services. And serving on several key committees, like the [VA] secretary’s Advisory Committee on Prosthetics and Special Disabilities Programs and the Prosthetics and Sensory Aids [Service]; we serve on the ISO Wheelchair Standards Committees; international standards committees and national standards committees; and also serving/leading various clinical practice guidelines committees, like the Consortium for Spinal Cord Committees; the VA and DoD practice guidelines – we cover all the bases. What’s unique, I think, is that we have engineers and physicians and OTs [occupational therapists] and PTs [physical therapists] and social workers, and we have counselors, prosthetists, orthotists all working together.

 

It sounds like you’re working with a very complete unit; you’re not just working in a bubble. In fact, you’re very well integrated with industry and your client base.

I think we have to be. We try to be very well connected to the community of users, to the manufacturing community, to the service providers, as well as the research community. Our goal is really to improve the mobility and function of veterans with disabilities through advanced engineering and medical rehabilitation research so that they achieve the highest level of help and quality of life and participation in society.

 

We talked a little about how some of these technologies are reaching into the area of prosthetics. How will robotics enhance wheelchairs?

I think robotics is going to be the future for powered chairs. Just the idea, I guess there’s a couple of concepts, but the idea of being able to provide people who have very severe physical, perhaps sensory and even cognitive impairments, regular independence and function in their homes, and communities, and most natural environment – robotics seems to be the next natural step. We view robotics as the concept of sliding autonomy. Basically it means allowing the system to be tunable, adjustable, perhaps even self-tuning. To go from where the user would have complete control, performing the specific task, or activity to where the robotic wheelchair would have complete control. It could slide anywhere along that continuum at the user’s discretion.

 

Could you give me a practical example of sliding autonomy?

A practical example … actually it’s very good. It can drive over level surfaces pretty easily but if you then … drive up to a curb you would basically change to an autonomous mode or maybe semi-autonomous mode to drive over the curb. Autonomous would be that you push a button and the chair drives over the curb and … releases the control back to you, then you drive on. Semi-autonomous would be you still operate the joystick to adjust the speed going up over the curb, but the wheelchair itself decides how to move the wheels and how to adjust its position and your seating position to safely get you over the curb.

Another example would be that if your wheelchair seat is tilted too far back, and you’re at risk for tipping over as you start to go up an incline, [semi-autonomous sliding autonomy] could be as simple as reminding you to slow down, or it could even actually adjust your seat functions so that you would, from your perspective, just drive.

 

Let’s say 50 years from now, do you think there will be a time where wheelchairs are obsolete?

You know, that’s a question I get a lot and I think the answer would be probably not. The reason I say that is because people use wheelchairs for a large variety of reasons. If you just simply look at the diagnoses that people have who use wheelchairs – from chronic injury to severe traumatic brain injuries to multiple amputations to multiple sclerosis to stroke to muscular dystrophy, there are literally hundreds of different diagnoses. And they all have their different limitations, from physical, sensory, cardiovascular, balance, and fatigue; there are all kinds of reasons. My guess is that we’re not going to medically find a cure for all of those. While I think that there will be other technologies that will mature, I don’t think they will be able to accommodate all the different people who use wheelchairs today. …

Wheelchairs are very efficient compared to other technologies, even [compared to] prosthetic limbs. If you define a wheelchair per se, there are a lot of amputees – especially in the VA and military population – who use Segways as well as prosthetic limbs. You could define the Segway® within wheeled-mobility devices. As people look to optimize their mobility, as long as the technology continues to do that, I think that [wheelchairs] will exist.

 

What is the coolest project happening at HERL right now?

[Laughing] That’s a loaded question. I think we have a lot of cool projects going on at HERL right now and I’d hate to single out just one. I think that we do all of our projects for a reason, so what’s “cool” is in the eye of the beholder. Some would say robotics work is really cool, others would say brain-interface, and other users say [our] work on manual wheelchairs – you know, seating or wheelchair propulsion, body mechanics, or transfer of body mechanics; if you were to poll 100 people, they’d find 10 of our different projects as the coolest projects.

 

Dr. Cooper, I thank you very much for your time and for the work that you do!

I think it’s a calling; it’s really a labor of love. I think it’s really a privilege to assist fellow veterans and our military personnel as well. It’s a blessing to have a center like this as well.

This story was first published in The Year in Veterans Affairs & Military Medicine 2012-2013 Edition.