17. Rory Cooper: on rehabilitation engineering, evolution of wheelchair design, and Paralympic sports

Welcome to Gears of Progress, a perfect place to learn about research in rehab engineering and assistive tech. As usual, I'm your host, Sasha, a research engineer at the University of Washington, and this is episode number 17. Today in my studio, we have Dr. Rory Cooper, who has so many titles that it will probably take the entire episode to list all of them. Just a couple of very important ones from them is that he's a distinguished professor at the University of Pittsburgh, is the founding director of the Human Engineering Research Laboratories. He is a Paralympian and he's a national medal of technology and innovation laureate and pretty cool entrepreneur with a lot of patents. I am really excited to interview you today, Dr. Cooper. Thanks so much for your time for being on the podcast. Thank you. I think most importantly, I'm an engineer, right? Yes. That's right. That in itself is a difficult title to attain. Absolutely. In a way, you're kind of pioneered a lot of research work in the space of rehabilitation engineering. The question I always like to ask in the very beginning is, how did you get to that pass? When you started, was it even termed rehabilitation engineering or was it something else? How I got to that path was after I got injured, I studied engineering. I actually did re-eubing engineering out of necessity, even though I didn't know what it was, because the quality of the assistive technology at the time was significantly different than it is today. I really didn't discover rehabilitation engineering until I was a doctoral student that that was a field. Resna actually already existed at that time as the re-eubing engineering society of North America, now the re-eubing engineering assistant technology, society of North America. That wasn't really a discipline, per se. There were no academic departments in the United States. There were some clinical departments in some re-eub centers and hospitals, but how I got into the field to focus my life on that professionally was when I was a doctoral student, my advisor, basically, just said, "You know, you could do this stuff for a living, right?" I thought, "Really?" And so I learned more about it. I went to a Resna conference. I went to an IEEE and BS conference, so I had an Institute of Electroelectronics Engineers engineering medicine biology, Society of Conference. And so there was a re-eubing engineering section at the IEEE meeting and the Resna was all about re-eubing engineering at the time. And I thought, "Oh, okay, so maybe there is a little bit of an industry here. There's some research there." At that time, they were called RECs, re-eubing engineering centers. They later added the second R. And so I thought, "Okay, but I still, my degree is actually in ECE, electrical engineering and computer engineering with a concentration in biomedical engineering." But my dissertation was focused on, was really re-eubing kind of. It's a combination of a control theory and re-eubing engineering doctoral dissertation. The University of California, Sarah Barbara and neither they or I were completely convinced that re-eubing engineering was going to be a viable career field. So I think they advised me and I sort of advised to hedge my bets a little bit. But it's all worked out and re-eubing engineering is still, unfortunately, would say a mainstream engineering discipline. I think it's really more viewed as, and I don't have an opinion one way or the other, but it seems to be more viewed as a subset of biomedical engineering. Maybe a subset of human factors engineering in some communities. The more important thing is it doesn't really matter. Even in my lab, we have mechanical engineers, biomedical engineers, computer engineers, electrical engineers, mechanical PT's, OT's, physicians, counselors. But really, to me, it's not about what you call yourself. It's what can you do for actually what can you do with people with disabilities? I like to make that a distinction because I think it's important. We don't do things for people with disabilities, we do things with people with disabilities. People with disabilities, of course, can also, like myself, be engineers or healthcare professionals or scientists as well. So we all have, play multiple roles in our life, right, from talk to you, your mother, wife, engineer or scientists. So there's people with disabilities that are no different. Absolutely. Am I in sharing? I'm actually kind of curious. What was your dissertation on just a tiny bit more of a depth? Yeah, I don't remember the title of my dissertation exactly right now, but it was basically, it was mostly about mathematical modeling, interestingly enough, of wheelchair racing. I was at that time, I was, you know, having into the Paralympics and got an athlete and I really wanted to understand the science of the human body interaction with machines. And so, you know, there's a saying and automotive racing, sort of, you race it on Sunday and drive and sell it on Monday. And so I thought, you know, if you learn about wheelchair racers, you can learn a lot about what's needed in everyday life and optimization of it to the body. And I did some non-linear modeling, I did some physiological modeling and I created some instruments to collect data like the smart wheel, which actually worked out to be pretty interesting because it led me to one of my questions for future work that I wound up studying for several years was and people are still studying for that matter is, you know, wheelchair racers don't really have a higher incidence of injury to their upper extremities than other wheelchair users, other manual wheelchair users. But they push so many more miles and what's wise that the case, that, you know, led me to look at like Harpal Tunis Syndrome, Runture, Caffeine Gearies and study that problem for a number of years. So yeah, that was, it was good. And my dissertation committee was also mixed up, mixed up a mix of I-2, one single processing person, one controls person, actually in a biomedical engineer and a physiologist. So it's kind of a mix, but it was good. That's kind of what you need anyways, right? It's a multi-disploded field. So you have a multi-disploded committee. Absolutely. Is there an answer to that question that you were studying that developed out of your dissertation? Yeah, there's a couple of answers. I mean, it's body positioning, right? It's body positioning. It's about strengthening conditioning, stretching and also it's about fit of the person to the wheelchair. So it actually, out of that caveness concept, the wheelchair is an extension of the person. MIT did a study and wrote a book about that in the early 2000s. And so they credited me as one of the people sort of looking at that sort of helping establish that field. And so it was actually resulted in much lower incidence of carpal tunnel syndrome, rotator cuff injuries in today's population of manual wheelchair users. And we literally, it was about 80% when I started studying the problem. It's down to about 20%. So it's made a significant difference in lowly hundreds of thousands of people's lives of duck millions. And then we started studying that and developed an expectation. We progressed into other areas as well. And then eventually expanded outside of wheelchairs into robotics and wearables. I mean, the wheelchair research actually started with a wearable, started for us. The smart will, I consider, are wearable. It's part of your wheelchair, which is part of the extension of use. It's kind of a wearable device. They also, we've branched the mother, you know, her all's much broader now into robotics and transportation and other medical devices as well still doing, so doing significant work on wheelchairs. You mentioned in the very beginning this, the importance of the idea of designing with people was disabilities versus four people was disabilities. And that's kind of resonates with the, the principles of participatory design, co-design, user centered design. In many decades of experience, doing rehab engineering work, what are the differences that you've noticed when, like, can you spot that the team was designing for versus with that there is this. of missing component without having land user involved? - Yeah, the forex I've seen thousands of people that had good intentions that went awry. There's kind of two things you can run into. If you're trying to design something for a larger population of the disabilities, you need to include a larger population of people with disabilities. So you do wind up with somebody that they built under for their son or daughter and think it's the greatest thing in the room for everybody without realizing there's just so much individual and subpopulation difference. If that might not be the case, the other thing I've seen is, you know, if you don't work with people, close with people, disabilities, you can wind up doing, if you're successful it works out. You just, you know, may not have been, you might have just identified a solution that is workable, probably largely by chance. But the other, most, the more common outcome is, either you reinvent something that already exists or has existed and it actually works, might actually work reasonably well or maybe didn't work well. And there was a reason why it didn't and people abandoned it. You kind of reinvented something or the other one is just sort of miss the mark, right? It just was never any good. And so it's a common problem. I mean, by people who just don't, they get married to their idea too much and not listen to what's really the needs are. So I think to be successful, but participate in design and engineering or participate in research is, is you've got to be very careful about just finding the problem. It's got like, you know, Robert Einstein was once asked, if you had an hour to save the world, what would you do? And he said, I would take 55 minutes to finding the problem and five minutes working on the solution. And that's kind of the same, that's really what we're talking about with business, business, and design engineering and business and research is the better you understand the problem, the easier it is to find a workable solution. And the other thing is that, you know, pain or par are much more complicated than that because you want to do, you have to work on communication, right? So as I, if you have somebody who's, you know, an engineer with a disability or a computer scientist with disability, it makes that communication go easier. But also you want to do, you know, focus groups, interviews and storyboarding and come up with, you know, maybe not working prototypes, but you know, we could either wizard of Oz, them, or at least have lock up their models and then get into working prototypes and then, you know, further refine them and you've got to do the process. It's a bit of an iterative process, right, with hopefully with milestones to achieve. But you need to engage people throughout the entire process. - I see. And most of your work has clearly been a lot focused around innovating wheelchair designs. How have they changed since the time you started? - Yes. Well, that's a interesting question. I guess probably the most significant change was, there were like, when I was first injured, two basic wheelchair designs, really you could even argue one, same wheelchair design and then put a motor on it and made it a power chair, say like a main chair, you threw a motor on it, made it a power chair. There was just one design. And then now there are, I probably the most important example is it's almost, wheelchairs is almost evolved to be like shoes in a race of analogy in many ways, that the idea of, you know, fading and sizing, like shoes now come to wheelchairs and made a large part and played a large part and that changing of the mindset of the materials, using advanced materials, just like, you know, if you look at, if we're running shoes or athletic shoes, they all see advanced materials and design processes and manufacturing processes, wheelchairs have sort of done the same thing in parallel now finally. And then for the fact is there's now wheelchairs for everyday, for travel, for almost every sport imaginable, some basketball, rugby, wheelchair, tennis, pick them all, anything you can think of pretty much, which, you know, that's, it's not the concept you see as one thing for everything. It's like, you know, playing in work boots, you know, doing everything work for it's from running to swimming. We now have, you know, different devices, which is huge, erasing chairs for that matter to you. And they have tremendously just changed people's performances as well, or even abilities to participate. Had the good fortune of being in that Paris Paralympics this year and, you know, you saw you actually, an amazing performance is from athletes around the world in, in, you know, in a whole variety of different sports. And that only represents the subset of the sports that people with disabilities participate in. And not only that, now that you look, there's more that, you know, there's a, can you work in expanding opportunities and that's now including for work and for education. So devices that can get out and let people do field work are more fully participating in lab work. And so the more renewable and have, you know, could go hot, you know, go from the floor to, to high, you know, to high shelf. So I think, what's really cool is every time you open up some opportunities you create new design challenges and that creates new opportunities and it keeps evolving. And that, what I think it's really exciting to me is, you know, you're a little bit younger than I am. So you, I mean, when I was in, when I was first injured, you just didn't see that many people with disabilities, at least not with using assistive technology out in public. And because of the architectural, you get also this kind of chicken egg thing, you get architectural changes, you get wheelchair technology changes, mobility technology changes, and you also get a societal and added to normal changes, right? So now you can put curb cuts in, you get better wheelchairs, more people go outside, more people expect to see people outside. So then you make stores more accessible, you make, you know, schools more accessible, you make, you know, employment still a bit about barrier, but you can make employment more accessible. That people are like, oh, yeah, I, I mean, they go down to street, and I would go down the street when I was first injured in a wheelchair and little kids would ride to you, and you know, parents would say, oh, they don't bother that poor man, and then or pat you on the head. And now it's, you go down the street, and on the carry, just another person going down the street, which is significant progress. That really means to design, leading to social change. - Yeah, absolutely. What that made me think of is that, oh, I'm lucky enough to have immigrated to the United States where the concept of accessibility is evolving, but I know that unfortunately isn't actually the case in many other countries around the world. Like I always kind of think back to the country I grew up in. There was even a video I recently saw of a city mayor. I think he was like assessing the accessibility of sidewalks in his city. And to do that, he like sat in a wheelchair, and the entire video is him just falling over everywhere, like every corner. It's picking up, but I just wish it was picking up faster around the world. - Not that you make an excellent point. It's not the same everywhere in the world. Unfortunately, it's not like, it's like pretty much everything else, right? Internet access is not ubiquitous throughout the world. Public access to public transportation is not the same. Economic opportunities, not the same. So the US and in some Western European countries, Japan tend to be fairly well because they have more, they have a higher GDP and more discretionary income. So you get changes, but they're a large portions of the world that are still very challenging for people with disabilities, especially if they, well, for all kinds of disabilities, be honest. I mean, it's physical disabilities where you need some sort of mobility device. It's maybe a little more obvious, but if you need also, computer technology for communication or vision technology, all of you, they use them, they have the same barriers. I mean, they're different barriers, but same challenges, right? And so, So, and that's a challenge to work on. We've done some work in that area, for us particularly in Brazil and India. And, you know, the Paralympics is trying to work in Africa and South America and in portions of Asia quite a bit. And then of course, you know, you could have a great infrastructure and people can destroy it through conflict as well. So, there's, fortunately, there's probably, I mean, the World Health Organization estimates about 120 to 150 million people need a wheelchair and only about 30 million people have access to one and they estimate that there's about a billion people who have some form of disability in the world. And so, and I know, I don't know the statistics off the top of my head, but you know, it's still probably somewhere on the order of about, you know, 20% of the world's population of people with disabilities at least receive the reasonable accommodations or mostly, you know, that all the accommodations they probably need, I'm not sure anybody's any countries have been to succeed at that, but at least, you know, accommodations to live through. And there's a significant portion of the world that remains facing significant challenges. But I think when the keys are, you know, accessibility, access to education, I think the UN Convention on the human rights of people with disabilities is really significant. The language in the UN Convention is important and powerful, but treaties and resolutions are only a piece of the puzzle. You need to apply resources, have the resources and apply the resources and you need to have, it has to be an important issue to society, especially people in power, to make the changes. But part of that is to recognize that all people in society have the rights as humans to be here. And secondly, that they have something to contribute. Absolutely. I think this is a perfect segue into my next question. And it ties into this idea of assistive technology being accessible in the first place and at least in the way it works in the US, you know, everything is tied strongly to reimbursement codes and insurances and things like that. And I had an episode with Rita Stanley from Resna, who works actively with policy makers to kind of change that and create more access to assistive technology. How do you ensure that whatever comes out of your lab, out of your research, the technology that you patent is actually accessible to the people that need it? That's a great question. And there's actually multiple ways to do that. So first, we have to understand that, you know, not all people's satisfielies are without means. And so, in it, a lot of assistive knowledge is actually purchased by the individual. And you can go to a big box store or a home improvement store and invite actually a lot of VISTA devices in there and people purchase out a pocket. And also, there are, typically, the more expensive, more complex devices that are covered in countries like the United States with through insurance or some third of third party payer mechanism. I know that's kind of a complicated way to say, but that can be insurance or a state program or a federal program. The orn employer supported program. And so, we need to educate people. So, I think there's two things that we try to do. One of them is we make sure that we're solving a real problem. So, you guys back to the engagement of users and inclusion of users in the middle process. And then the second part of it is ensuring that you have objective data that policy makers and, for that matter, financial decision makers can use to make informed decisions. I think, unfortunately, for decades, that was a problem that we had in this field as people would invent or create things, to bring them to market or have the desire to bring them to market. But they really didn't have any data to show that it was significantly different than what already existed. And it was new and novel and to make a significant difference in people's quality of life, from ability, your health, and or employment opportunities or education opportunities. So, it makes it difficult for decision makers, right? Because you might have a compelling example of personal testimony, but when you're trying to make, when you have limited resources and everybody has limited resources, you're trying to make good decisions, that's just difficult to make a decision based on. So, I think you can see the success that Rita's had over the years has been more likely when she has data to support her arguments. And that makes more convincing. That helps to tell a more convincing story. So, if you combine the personal impact and say, "Here's the impact on Rory." And by the way, this data shows that this impact can be multiplied 100,000 times or a thousand times or 10,000 times based on what we've been able to require. So, I think what's happened over the last 20 years probably is really policy advocates, consumer advocates, and engineers and scientists have actually started to communicate and at least share information with one another. I don't think it's necessary the job of a scientist or engineer to think I think they should be able to educate and inform policy. If they so choose, they can jump over and actually write policy or run for elected office, but at one point you need to be objective so that you let other people advocate, which is a significant challenge for me. But in regards, you know, you want to. But you need to have a real life compelling story backed up by evidence. Absolutely. I think one thing that I clearly remember from that episode was Rita was her strong suggestion to never and your research papers on an assistive technology saying more research is needed. Yeah, it was. So, it's our responsibility to also conduct higher quality research. I've been on the number of panels that have tried to evaluate the quality of research related to re-ambigodering assistive technology. And, you know, quite frankly, one of the challenges is we have a lot of sort of case study or case series type research in not research that is, you know, maybe of higher clinical significance. And so that becomes a challenge for Rita and for policy makers. Of course, it's not that science is near in the field, would like to do that. They're also limited by the availability of funds for them, right? And your center, the create center and the integral also don't have unlimited funds to do whatever we want to do. And then secondly, it is expensive to do some of the larger scale studies. There's no, I'm not aware of any companies in the world that are or any fundigated to the world that would like, you know, buy 100 robotic arms, right? And say, let's see what happens. You know, this is what a very carefully controlled trial. So we're stuck. And then we have to, I would say in the last 10 to 15 years, we really started working on better methods. methodologies because it's pretty hard to do a double-blinded randomly controlled trial in a system of technology. You're going to have one group where you give them a wheelchair, another group you don't, or you're going to make them reuse the wheelchair blind folded for six weeks or whatever. And then you're supposed to the clinician's not supposed to know either. I mean, so that's just as a work. You have to have better, have to have other methodologies right and try to remove some of the bias in that. The other thing I think is also important is, you know, sometimes the answer is obvious. If you, if you know, if I use my own example, if I didn't have a wheelchair, I just couldn't even get out of bed or not very far at least. So it's almost the parachute study, right? We need to sort of person that we are playing without a parachute and another one with the parachute to see if parachutes are effective. And so we have to sometimes about educating, right? So you can push it, "Wow, it's a really high quality study." And I do not think it's not a high quality study. It's not a classical protocol used for a pharmaceutical. But it is a reasonable study, right? It's the apple size is large enough that bias is to remove, and the study is designed to remove as much as the bias is possible. And that's also educating people to look at science in a way that they might not otherwise because they're just seeing different type of science. Absolutely. Those are all very great points. You participate in Paralympics as a Paralympian. You also participate in a Paralympic team as a sports scientist. I am very curious about what the experience of being a sports scientist for a Paralympic team is and what do they actually do? What is the work and tale? Well, it's a lot less stressful to be a sports scientist than the Paralympics that it is to be an athlete or a coach. It is a sort of unique life experience for elite athletes to be able to be on a playing field or a quarter track or whatever it is and have 70,000 people in the stands or a television audience of a million people. Most people never get that experience in their life and then realize that the focal point is on you or at least a small group of you. And then in its same time you spent years, hours and years of blood, sweat and tears to get there. So it's everybody else and you of course want to take that opportunity to shine and perform the best you can. And Nestle and I really is enough in the Olympics and the Paralympics and other sports. It is nice to win medals. In the end, the one common factor is most everybody just wants to perform at their best and hope that their best is enough to win a medal or break a record or set a record. As a scientist, of course, our goal tends to be a little more long-term thinking in the Paralympics we tend to think in quadranials of four-year cycles. It's a little more challenging now because the Olympics are a biennial event. They have winter summer or summer winter or summer winter. And some of the scientists are engaged in both summer and winter Paralympics or winter Olympics. So to give you an idea what the scientists working groups or committees look at is we have engineers looking at the technology, the technological advances and whether they enhance the sport and improve safety and whether they maintain fairness. That could be some pretty broad discussion about fairness, like access to technology versus fairness to the other competition or advancing the sport. For example, as a natural evolution of the sport, there are people that look at classification and adaptive sport because you're looking at trying to find out what's the minimum competition set basically. And so how do we make that fair and equitable with limited size venues, limited resources? And then you have issues of basically physiology, exercise and so how do you maintain, by beginning, how do you maintain, how do you leave that, achieve that level of performance, how do you maintain that level of performance and how do you do that without harming yourself, a short-term or long-term. And then you have the medical side, how do you provide the medical care, what the medical resources are needed, what type of injuries or illnesses are the athletes susceptible to and a lot of times we talk about elite athletes. They can deliver amazing performances but they're often type also, you know, running their body at pretty close to the limits of its capabilities. And so that's important to understand as well. And then we have people who look at coaching and how do you do that in athlete development. So you know how do you educate coaches and athletes so that they can integrate the best science and adapt it to their safety and performance. Then we have people that look at ethics in sports so that could be safe, sport, be a behavior, treatment of, you know, ethical treatment of ethical relationships, but athletes, coaches, officials, and other people in the movement. And then, you know, that could also, that pleads over into, you know, what drugs, medications, even technologies are lawful from an ethical perspective. And then you have a safe sport. So how do we treat one another? We behave, what is up to the limits of behavior. And then we have the sort of the perceptions as well. So how does the media perceive people, disabilities, and athletes and as a, you know, and now does it perceive the movement. So you're getting growing coverage, is a positive coverage, negative coverage, what type of coverage. And so yeah, so you would think, oh, it's, you know, like why would these be science in the Olympics or the Paralympics and because those are all important questions to ask. If you want to continue to advance the movement and you want to achieve the goals of the movement, can you also want to make sure that athletes, coaches, family, spectators, organizers all have a safe and positive experience. That's quite a crew behind a single athlete or a team of athletes even. That's a lot. Yeah, and it varies, you know, you, you could be a scientist for an individual team or an individual sport and you get more focus. Still have coverage, pretty much all the same topic areas. And then you could be for a single country and then, you know, at the IPC level, it's, it's the whole global IPC movement. That's pretty cool. One thing I thought you mentioned this, you know, the thinking of the ethics of access to technology. And I know this is something that's talked widely about Olympics, the, the, the entire talk on whether it's the countries that was more resources that win the most medals because they have access to all of the latest tech, the latest, I don't know, swimsuits, track suits, whatever it is that enhances your capabilities in a way. Is this a similar conversation that's had at Paralympics as well? Oh, yeah, of course. And we have, we have the same problems actually even amplified, right? Because you've got a lot of, there's more of the sports involved technology than they do in the Olympics. And then secondly, you know, the athletes have to have access to opt-in modified technology even to participate at all. It's, that becomes an issue for us. And then for others, you know, typically if you use the Olympic rule, the desk beat commercially male or, you know, a sort of level of customization, you got really applied at so much to the Paralympics because. UNI can't effectively use the same wheelchair in every prosthetic, for example. Essentially, we have wax in every wheelchair, every prosthetic, every orthosis. Our custom fit into the individual, otherwise, they're useless. So we have those sort of challenges. I mean, the bigger challenges are sought to explain if you want to go to the Olympics or the Paralympics as an athlete, you really have to have three things. You have to have talent. You have to pick the sport to fit your body type and your genetics and your fitness and your interests. So that's your talent or ability. You have to have desire. You may be the best athlete in the world. You just don't want to go. Rather than a mechanical engineer and not really care about running the 100 meter in the Olympics or the Paralympics, and all of these, those are both sort of fine. And then the third part is you have to have access. You have to have access to coaches, equipment, training, facilities, all those sorts of things, or access or opportunity. I guess you either call it access or opportunity. And oftentimes, that's sort of more the talent. A lot of people, you can find ACE work that you're good at. So it could be physical strength sport, it could be an endurance sport, it could be a speed sport, it could be an intellectual sport, it could be a team sport, an interactive sport. There's all kinds of ways to think about that. You drive or desire, that's mostly an internal motivator. Sometimes you have the right coach or family member or somebody that can help be an extrinsic motivator. But still, you have to get to that level. You have to be intrinsically motivated and you can have something to guide you. The biggest challenge is the opportunity or the access because that's largely driven by the outside. That's out of the person's control often. So the other, that's where we need society to think about that. It's interesting, think about it. That's one of the reasons society makes choices to have parks and playgrounds and public facilities. It's because there are other benefits besides going to the Olympics or Paralympics, just about finding something that you would enjoy and that you can, it helps promote your health and fitness in the broadest sense. And that you can do hopefully for a long period of time or you can successfully transition from one activity to another. You've also you yourself as a pilot and your technology has participated in an event that almost feels like an Olympics, but it's not an Olympics. The side bath on and I actually just had an interview on that recently that will be coming out soon. Can you talk about this experience? What it was like? And I think what do you think the role of events like this are in moving the space of assistive tech forward? I have pretty spin and side bath on variety of roles from being a team leader, a pilot and or help shape some of the rules of the organization. I think it's a good idea. It's got some challenges. Of course starting the Paralympics had challenges as well or the National Veterans' Wheelchair Games or things like that. I think it's good against opportunity for like I said earlier for for people with disabilities and engineers and designers to participate in sports and otherwise wouldn't be available. It's sort of a side bath on it's kind of an interesting combination of a design challenge, a design competition, a sports competition and a spectacle all at once. I know they've been working one of the challenges of it. It's because of the I-Tech nature of the side bath on it can be rather expensive to participate in a team. I've been participating in the first competitions for a number of years as well. I think it's a bath on mine out to look at how do they evolve like first did when they have first and then first leg of league. I think there's a first one. There's another first where it's like you've got the highest level because you have the largest budget and then you have the next level where you have sort of a limited tool set but you have to rely on your creativity and then you have the LEGO group where basically everything's even more specified in order to make it more accessible and affordable for people. So that's one of the considerations of side bath on is there is that that much industry involvement they haven't seen the value of competing in the side bath on. It's more of a somewhere between small business research centers and student groups. It's a good showcase for technology and it continues to evolve and I think it continues to improve. It's well spent around for eight years now. It's started to show a little bit of sustainability when you see where it goes. At the very least it helps bring attention to the new technologies as well. So people can see what is sort of what is evolving. I mean, I think, yeah, I mean, I want to get it would certainly I'm all for more opportunities, not fewer opportunities. So it can come up with when people engage in new sports or recreation activities or technology, the support new sports or recreation activities. I think that's I think that's great. I think the other I think there needs to be some sort of a companion to the side bath on at some point as well. That's more of not so much of a competition, but more of a challenge because if you think about I could give you a couple examples from other other domains, but like a marathon. So you know, you can you can try to win a marathon or you can just set the goal of finishing the marathon or finished the marathon under certain time and you can work to earn your finish your spinal because that in itself is a significant accomplishment. Or you know, if your boy scouts or girl scouts you you can earn married badges or you can earn various badges for achieving certain milestones, right? Getting certain knowledge. I think that would be another dry. I think that's kind of a little bit of a. And it's that might be missing is it say I'm not you know for those people that not necessarily interested in in whether they they're you know they could equate a course faster than somebody else, but more of a moonshot type concept like I don't hear from it without for me a starpa challenges. You know they were sort of a milestone based competition. You know can you drive it at all in this vehicle without a human inter interference from barsto to Las Vegas or something like that right or urban challenge or you know can you build a spaceship and land on the moon kind of thing. I think there's we tried that the Toyota mobility foundation and Toyota Toyota challenge back start I guess in 2017 through 2020. That you know that was an attempt that was an attempt at that. I thought was interesting about that and I was involved in that as well and that was you know the idea was to stimulate innovation. And maybe and eventually even new start up companies the winner did actually start a startup company is business still in business four years later which is a good sign a lot of businesses don't make it past three years so it's like as you could consider success and some of the other competitors that made it further along are still in business as well. So that's you know good that's was to stimulate start up so light that that's also needed to so you need a rich environment and the needs of people disabilities and older adults are still pretty pretty great or are great and the resources for new new technology development or are still quite limited so we need to be creative on what we can do to stimulate more activity as a veteran grocery. do you feel like your military experience shaped your research work in any way or affected and so how has it done so? Yeah well of course you know my military experience and then there are people I served with that went to the first school for and to Panama and to Grenada. I mean that's simple fact of life the United States since 1941 that we've been almost been continuously engaged in some form of conflict and so that means we are fortunately producing a you know some some number of healthy men and women returning every year with some forms of disability and and and somebody needs to try to address those needs and oftentimes the after for example with the post-9/11 veterans we we learned you know medical and trauma acute care trauma care medical care improved to the point where we had new types of disabilities such as polytrauma coming about people were living with you know more severe burns than we'd ever experienced before people living with higher levels of of a brain trauma and multiple traumas and other other conditions you know I feel like since they you know I have some understanding and empathy for my own service the importance of that the United States as a country or has the obligation of the responsibilities of the country to try to ensure that we provide them the the resources the tools and the in the medical care in that manner the other wraparound services to help them achieve their health and retarget or identify their new life goals and to help them achieve them and so that they can reintegrate into society as successful veterans and uh it to me that's just a particular experience to me I you know obviously people with childhood disabilities are acquiring disabilities older adults or civilians that acquire disabilities due to injury illness disease or or trauma are also also valuable as well I just think that we you know I think I might you know my own time I want to make sure I do the significant portion of at least to those people who have experienced some of the consequences of serving our country yeah I want to say thank you for your service hey hey appreciate veterans in many different ways I wanted to bring it to a lighter note and ask a question yeah sure we know like uh the other thing you know I mean that I would reflect I mean veterans of after after experience trauma and experienced war have some of gone on to do some really amazing things all the way from not just being the good neighbor uh to um to serving as the president of the United States in or to be a leaders in industry or academia so you know that's a one like people to understand that there a lot of our veterans are I just really remarkable amazing people and I have a lot of a lot of talent to offer from people like Bob Dole or Daniel Anway to you know Curly you know Tammy Duckworth for example they're just amazingly remarkable people and that's just in the political in the political sector um in there are other people that are um starting small businesses and working in large corporations or uh students in academia or you know professors are or others in academia and there's others that are doing really remarkable work in the in the not for profit and service sector and so that's uh you know the really frankly the the story of a veteran is by a large a positive story absolutely I guess I want to bring on a funny note we could pdia mention that you were a competitor in the national veterans wheelchair game since 1983 and you've won over 200 medals in total in a lot of sports such as sleighloom tracks swimming table tennis and hand cycle where do you store all those medals so that's uh funny um the my my mother uh over 40 years ago built a treasure chest for me and uh one of my parents and um and so I I store most of my medals in that treasure chest um it's um it's gotten a bit it's not quite large enough anymore so I have some stored in boxes and drawers as well I could tell you if you want a little bit of a humorous story um the uh president of our university was overhouse for dinner this is like you know 20 years ago and he asked me that same question so the key thought in our house would be covered with medals and trophies and then you know it probably looks like most every south they're more pictures of friends and family and nicknames from traveling than there are and so it's so so where are your medals and I said they're in that prevertress sending right next to you he said aren't you worried about somebody stealing it I said just pick it up who was like 400 pounds many of course didn't open it up and it's pretty funny because when we've had like my nieces and nephews were in their little or friend when their kids were little they you know it's kind of like the right height when you're uh in your like two to six years old so they they all open it up and they realize it's a real treasure chest right if it's you're not age you looking there it's it is it's all golden silver bronze right it's the it looks like a real treasure chest and so I've opted has been has been funny when we got you know I've we've been sitting in our living room sometimes and I see like you know niece or nephew come walking out as a as a toddler a young kid it was like eight medals around their neck but they're out down to that treasure chest so yeah that's that's I just kind of put them in there I don't know why I have a few of them hanging in my office at home and then you've actually seen the background there's a few other more awards for science and innovation in engineering but my athletic medals just yeah they I might have to get another I was actually getting another friend of mine unfortunately passed away a few years ago he was going to make me a second treasure chest but he didn't he didn't get to it so I'm going to have to find another alternative at some point but that I think that's actually kind of fitting and the downside is the older ones are at the bottom and so yeah so that's where I put them so I don't have to look at them I just look at the treasure chest and know they're in there and most of the you know the funny thing about it is I've had asked about that before especially from athletes you know so really what the medals are is the medals themselves have most of the time no intrinsic value the really important thing is the memories they represent the friend you met the people you competed with and you know I you people I competed with on our team and people I were on other teams during the you know Paralympics for my marathon days a lot of them are still friends of mine we have great stories when I when I was at the Paralympics in Paris that I spent a lot of time with with my friends from who competed for Germany and the UK and others and so that's you know that's that's probably the greatest part about it it's it's the same in engineering and science as well right you you've been friends you made from college friends you made from work friend you made from conferences you know if you're fortunate you get into some of the elected societies you get you know you make new friends and that it's us so the medals really to me are more of a of a momentum or a reminder of an experience not so much the medal itself in the national veterans wheelchair games for 30 years now I've had a friend of me that I've been competing with you know for and so that's that's an kind of a fun relationship too where we have friends except we get to the competition field and then return to being friends afterwards and and we've been doing that for over 30 years and that's that's also that's kind of the You know, that's probably the, to me, that is sort of the three best experience of the National Barren's Wilshire games over time have been those relationships of people that competed with and become friends with. Those young people are newly acquired impairment that we get to mentor and talk to and talk about what life experience there's a little like and then the opportunity to conduct research at the games and have veterans help guide our research and give us and participate in guide our research and so those experiences are actually the most important aspects for me and they're fun, that's just, they're fun. So my, you know, my wife didn't go for a number of years and she asked why I was, why, why it's still, it's probably the only thing in my life that I won't miss in, you know, if I'm in any way able to get there of the year. So as President Biden said, I'm going to hand to the numbers that they've not done in that week, I probably would have said, "Sir, we'll have to do it another time." But because it is, if you have a disability or you have a loved one with a disability, you probably understand this a bit better. But it's my, it's my chance, you know, for five days to be me, right? Everybody, you know, the vast majority of the issues, wheelchairs, everybody, in that case also has a, you know, military experience. And so then, you know, not a really politically correct term, but we're kind of normal at that time, that is the norm. And so it's, and that's, it's important, I think, physically, emotionally, spiritually to have that experience for me and for hundreds of other veterans. You know, some people come once and that's it, and that's also, you know, entirely appropriate and I welcome that. But just it's a special occasion for me. That's great to have that. I think there's a lot of value in sports in building that community and creating that sense of belonging. Yeah, I think it's, I mean, it's, I just go to have healthy experiences that you enjoy, right? They, they enrich our lives. I think a wrap-up question would be, what are you most excited about in the nearest future when it comes to assistive tech and rehabilitation engineering? And he trends that are picking up that are you are excited to see being applied in particular to wheelchair technology or beyond a wheelchair technology? Well, I think the most important trend is if we can get more people with disabilities engaged as scientists and engineers and healthcare professionals, those opportunities, that will transform the whole field. And, fortunately, now, you know, there's like a couple dozen others and we all know each other. And, wonderful, sometimes, if it was impossible to all know each other. You know, I do think there's some really cool, you know, new design techniques like origami, head curivariate, gummy inspired design that are exciting to me. There's the, I think, you know, robotics is also still driving things forward. Do quantum sensing technologies, I think, are when it transforms the field at some point? AI machine learning is still, I was also, I think, is going to transfer anything to touch us technology or probably also medicine as well. And then, so, and then I also think, you know, the sort of economic development opportunities if we can, we can somehow figure out how to get like greater internet access as lower college, lower barriers to, uh, tating college degrees, more like financial barriers, that sort of thing, uh, technical, uh, and inclusion barriers. Uh, then I, those are all things that are really going to transform this field, I think. Um, and then, uh, I guess the other one is, it's already as transforming the field as, uh, the communications technologies. Right? Like, we're using today, though, we can, you know, you don't have to fly to Pittsburgh, I don't have to fly to Seattle. Yeah, we can, we can talk as important the same room. And that's made us more, uh, really expanded the opportunity for, for communication and collaboration, which having those networks is going to spur even more advances or the pace of advancement. Absolutely. It was a pleasure chatting with you, Dr. Cooper. I learned, uh, a whole deal of new things today and I had a few good laughs too. Oh, thank you, Sasha. Appreciate talking with you. This episode was powered by create, the Center for Research and Education on Accessible Technology and Experiences at the University of Washington and Resna, the Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology Society of North America. Thanks for listening to this episode of Gears of Progress. If you enjoyed it, please consider rating this podcast on whichever platform you're using and share it with your friends. Also find Gears of Progress on LinkedIn to stay up to date on the latest information about releases. And as usual, stay tuned for the next episode.