# RR&D Research Career Scientist Award Application

> **NIH VA IK6** · VA EASTERN COLORADO HEALTH CARE SYSTEM · 2021 · —

## Abstract

The over-arching goal of the Nominees research activities is to improve the quality of life of veterans and
individuals with limb loss. Upper-limb prosthetics research is an area of particular interest and relevance to VA
especially in times of war. The Nominee through his Laboratory the VA/CU Biomechatronics Development
Laboratory and its people seeks to improve the prosthetic options available to veterans with limb loss through
the application of novel approaches and technology to the development of clinically relevant prosthetic systems
and solutions. While it is a personal goal of the Nominee to be able to develop an artificial hand replacement
capable of true dexterous manipulation for use by persons with upper-limb loss the Nominee and his team
explore all aspects of the problem ranging from neural control and sensing; mechatronic design and
development; novel actuator technologies; novel physical suspension/interface techniques; clinical deployment
of these systems; methods to manage phantom limb pain; conducting clinical testing of the systems developed.
The Nominee has been in the field of Prosthesis design and Rehabilitation Research in one form or another
(Student, Post-doc, Scientist, Mentor) for over 25 years and has maintained extramural funding over that period.
The Nominee has had numerous contracts and grants to develop advanced limb systems for a number of
different Federal funding agencies including VA, NIH, and DARPA as well as Subcontracts from UNB in Canada.
Over that time, in addition to being a VA Researcher and academic researcher, the Nominee completed the
training required to become a clinical prosthetist and was National Director of Research for Advanced Arm
Dynamics (AAD) for 2 years, (AAD is a national provider of upper-limb prosthetics care), providing the Nominee
with a deep clinical insight into how care is provided in our field of upper-limb prosthetics.
As a result, the Nominee believes he should explore and provide practical solutions to immediately pressing
clinical problems while also exploring ideas that push the envelope of current technology but that might lead to
platform level technologies with the potential for broad impact across a number of unrelated fields in the longer
term. The Nominee’s VA projects aim to address issues of immediate clinical relevance to veterans with arm
amputations but do so in a novel and innovative way. In particular, the Nominee’s current VA grant is to develop
and test a novel prosthesis controller based on the Nominee’s ideas of Posture Control. At issue is the poor
control available for current multifunctional electric hands that fails to enable them to operate at their fullest
potential. In Posture Control through novel processing the control signals are mapped to a two-dimensional
space where coordinates in the space represent hand postures enabling whole hand Posture Control rather than
joint based control. This control approach has been developed, tested and demonstrat...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10170157
- **Project number:** 5IK6RX002996-04
- **Recipient organization:** VA EASTERN COLORADO HEALTH CARE SYSTEM
- **Principal Investigator:** Richard Fergus ffrench Weir
- **Activity code:** IK6 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** VA
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** —
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2018-07-01 → 2023-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10170157

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10170157, RR&D Research Career Scientist Award Application (5IK6RX002996-04). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10170157. Licensed CC0.

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