About
Our vision is to accelerate development of personalized technologies to improve care and quality of life for Veterans with disabilities by initiating the VA Innovation Creation Series powered by VA Center for Innovation.
Goals
| 1 | Improve patient care and quality of life for our Veterans and their supporters. |
| 2 | Create an open ecosystem of designs of prosthetics + assistive technologies. |
| 3 | Demonstrate the value of rapid prototyping and co-creation to develop personalized technologies for Veterans and infuse practices into everyday healthcare processes. |
| 4 | Spread awareness of VA's prosthetics + assistive technologies capabilities. |
Timeline
Challenges
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Develop novel upper extremity prosthesis devices for everyday usage. |
Challenge |
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Create a medication pill box that allows the flexibility to hold medications that need to be taken up to 8 times a day with a reminder system for each time medication needs to be taken. |
Come to the make-a-thon on July 28th to solve this challenge! |
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Design a device to remotely change the speed and grip strength of a prosthetic device for our Veterans with upper extremity injuries. |
Come to the make-a-thon on July 28th to solve this challenge! |
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Create a way to reassign motions and buttons on gaming controllers to provide alternative access for veterans who are using them in therapy to improve eye hand coordination, fine motor control and/or range of motion. | Challenge |
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Create a device that can dampen tremors when someone is performing fine motor tasks. |
Challenge |
Makeathon Finale Event
The VA Innovation Creation Series will culminate in a 2-day make-a-thon event at the Richmond VA Medical Center where the online designs will be built and tested to showcase how they meet the needs of Veterans. At the makeathon, we will have speakers highlighting the need areas and opportunities facing our Veterans. A summary of these challenge can be found on the VA Innovation Creation Series site. In addition, participants will have the opportunity to pitch or present different problems or painpoints impacting differently-abled Veterans. Based on this pitches, teams will form and we will provide prototyping equipment along with mentorship support from Veterans and technical experts to help you co-design and develop your ideas to ultimately demo on the afternoon of July 29th.
You can watch the livestream of the makeathon event here!
Schedule for the Makeathon
Tuesday, July 28th
Opening Remarks and Keynote Presentations: 8:30-10:00am
First Round of Pitches: 10:00-10:30am
First Team Formation/Networking: 10:30-11:00am
Second Round of Pitches: 11:00-11:30am
Team Formation: 11:30-12:00pm
Making, Prototyping, and Mentoring: 12:00-9:00pm
Wednesday, July 29th
Making, Prototyping, and Mentoring: 8:00am - 2:00pm
Demo Presentations: 3:00-5:00pm
Collaborators
This event is also supported by the Girls' Lounge Collaborators, including GE, Google.org, Toyota, and Hino Trucks, along with our America Makes Collaborators, Stratasys and 3D Systems.
Interested in collaborating with VA Center for Innovation?
Help us spread the word!
We would love to work with you to spread the word about this event to help develop technologies and services for our nation's Veterans. You can download the press kit below to find out all the specifics of the event.
Press Kit