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$4.7 Million Awarded to CATEA to Continue Wheeled Mobility RERC

CATEA has recently been awarded a grant to continue research and development as the national Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Wheeled Mobility (Mobility RERC) for another five years. The goal of the Mobility RERC is to promote new ways of conceptualizing and understanding wheeled mobility -- from a focus on the device itself, to a focus on a broad range of interventions that impact device use and activity performance. In the long term, this approach will successfully enable as many individuals as possible to actively participate in everyday life.

Mobility RERC logo

During the five years of the first grant cycle (2003 to 2008), the Mobility RERC had become a recognized leader on issues and solutions related to wheeled mobility in everyday life.

To accomplish this, the research team led by Dr. Sprigle had to chart new territory by answering research questions that had previously been unasked and by evaluating outcomes that were previously ignored. To address participation in everyday life, the team had to take research out of the laboratory and put it in the real world everyday environments in which wheeled mobility occurs. As a result, the team has studied wheeled mobility in home and community settings; studied new interventions in a therapy gym; and monitored use and disuse of manual wheelchairs by elders in long term care settings.

More information about the Mobility RERC can be found on the project’s website: http://mobilityrerc.catea.gatech.edu. Funding for this five-year project (grant H133E080003) comes from the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, part of the U.S. Department of Education.

Contact

Summer Ienuso
CCN Coordinator
ccn@coa.gatech.edu