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Exoskeleton Device Donated to San Diego VA Will Help Rehabbing Vets

An incredibly expensive device just gifted to the San Diego VA will help literally lift up our injured veterans.

The device is called an Indego Therapy Exoskeleton made by a company called Parker.

It’s a device spinal cord injury patients wear that allows them to sit, stand and walk without a wheelchair. Veterans like Isaac Lopez say it gives them hope for a more independent future.

“This is something I never thought I’d see again, so it’s a life changer,” he said.

Lopez enlisted in the United States Coast Guard because he wanted to fight drug trafficking in Florida. But shortly after he completed boot camp in 2015, a spinal cord-deteriorating disease left him in a wheelchair.

“It just kinda happened over night. Just slowly lost the ability to walk,” he said. The eager teen from Hemet feared he’d never walk again.

Will Davis, a physical therapist at the VA, helps patients like Lopez use the exoskeleton for rehabilitation.

“It basically gives them back their independence. And that’s the main reason why do almost everything here,” Davis said.

On Monday, the nonprofit SoldierStrong donated a $130,000 exoskeleton to the VA in La Jolla. The hospital now has two it can use to help local veterans.

SoldierStrong says it has donated 21 exoskeletons, 17 of which have gone to the VA system.

Article by NBC San Diego 7: View Main Article

GRAHAM & COURTNEY RAHAL FOUNDATION RAISES RECORD AMOUNT THROUGH ANNUAL DRIVERS TOURNAMENT PRESENTED BY UNITED RENTALS

$310,000 Raised to Support SoldierStrong and CSU’s One Cure

Indianapolis, IN – The Graham & Courtney Rahal Foundation is pleased to announce that through its annual Drivers Tournament presented by United Rentals, it has raised a record amount – $310,000 – to support the Foundation’s primary benefactors, SoldierStrong and Colorado State University’s One Cure. Held on Thursday, May 23rd at Broadmoor Country Club in Indianapolis, Indiana, the sold-out golf event featured 144 players and received tremendous support from a great number of corporate partners.

“The level of participation in this year’s Drivers Tournament, from both individuals and corporations, was incredible,” said IndyCar star Graham Rahal. “It is awesome to see everyone rally together to support two great causes in SoldierStrong and One Cure. These two organizations do fantastic work in their respective fields and to be able to help them do more is very gratifying for Courtney and myself, as well as everyone associated with our Foundation. We have set the bar extremely high, but we will continue to push to do more each year with the Tournament and our other activities.”

SoldierStrong is a Stamford, Connecticut based 501(c)3 charitable organization whose mission is to improve the lives of the men and the women of the United States Armed Forces. Through cutting-edge rehabilitation, recovery and scholarship programs, SoldierStrong transforms the lives of U.S. service members by empowering them to regain their mobility, freedom and overall sense of identity. The Drivers Tournament, along with the Turns for Troops program powered by United Rentals (a primary partner of Rahal’s), is dedicated to supporting this initiative.

One Cure was founded on the principle that cancer affects all creatures and that treatment breakthroughs come through collaborations between scientists and doctors who are working with pets and people. For more than three decades, the Flint Animal Cancer Center has been the world’s leader in comparative oncology research. Studying canine cancer helps learn more about human cancer and the funds raised and donated to One Cure help support its Clinical Trials program which is the largest in veterinary medicine.

“Graham and I are so incredibly proud of the record-breaking amount the Tournament raised for two charities – in SoldierStrong and One Cure – that we are extremely passionate about,” said Courtney Force. “We are thankful to each and every corporate partner and player that helped and is continuing to help the Foundation make a positive impact. The success of this year’s event has further fueled our passion and we look forward to our annual headlining event again next May, as well as the many exciting events that we are currently working on for the near future!”

Next year’s Drivers Tournament will be held Thursday, May 21, 2020. To learn more about the event and how to participate, please visit www.GCRFoundation.org or email Brooke Rowden at bprowden@grahamrahalfoundation.org.

SoldierStrong uses ISU’s VR facility to combat PTSD

On an average day, 20 United States military veterans commit suicide.

“One a day is too many, but 20 is a big number. It’s unacceptable,” said Chris Meek, of Connecticut.

Meek, who is the co-founder of a non-profit called SoldierStrong, was in Ames on Thursday to meet with a group of experts to discuss how ISU’s Virtual Reality Applications Center (VRAC) can help veterans deal with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Last month, SoldierStrong launched a new program called StrongMind, which immerses the user in a virtual reality setting similar to the one that caused their trauma.

“We are going to be funding and donating virtual reality software, hardware and clinical training to VA facilities across the country to help veterans with post-traumatic stress,” Meek said.

Thursday’s meeting at Iowa State University was a parallel track to that initiative. As SoldierStrong staff researched how they could get involved in the mental health arena and focus on technology— which has been the organization’s strength in recent years— they located a number of experts, several of whom gathered at ISU for the meeting along with representatives from Iowa State.

“We feel ISU has the best hardware for virtual reality given the cave that’s here at VRAC,” Meek said.

“We are also working with the VA’s Innovators Network, which is a group of forward-thinking people in the VA who are helping us deploy the hardware and the software at 10 facilities around the country.”

The program will contribute data to the Million Veterans Program, which is a collaboration between the Department of Energy and the Department of Veterans Affairs. The program has the goal of collecting data on one million veterans.

“The DOE has five of the 10 world’s largest computers, and Iowa State University is the only university in the country that has a Department of Energy national lab here on campus,” Meek said. “The DOE collects all the data, and they give it to the VA to do various research projects.”

A big part of Thursday’s meeting involved the stakeholders deciding what data they would need, how they would use it and what they expected to achieve from it.

“My hope and goal is to come to some sort of a new solution of how to treat post-traumatic stress,” Meek said.

The stigma related to seeking help for PTSD remains one of the biggest obstacles for getting veterans to seek help. Meek is hopeful that offering therapy in a format that feels more like gaming that it does traditional counseling will encourage veterans to accept help — especially the current generation of veterans who grew up with video gaming systems.

“We’re hoping that the gaming feel to this program will reduce the stigma,” Meek said. “We’re hoping veterans will see it as a video game that helps you heal.”

But it’s not just recent veterans who deal with PTSD.

“We’ve lost more Vietnam-era veterans to suicide than whose names are on The Wall in Washington, D.C.,” Meek said. “And the post-9/11 generation is on that same path.”

The StrongMind program offers 14 different scenarios and each one can be tweaked a little bit to more closely resemble the scenario that is the trigger point for the individual veteran.

Being in a virtual environment resembling the traumatic experience creates an immersion therapy for the user.

Confronting the memory head-on, over and over again, reduces the brain’s response to it, so that ultimately, the veteran controls the memory and not the other way around.

“The whole goal is to reduce the trigger points that make you not want to talk about it or make you anxious or jumpy or scared,” Meek said.

As someone who worked three blocks from Ground Zero and was there on 9/11, Meek has first-hand knowledge of these trigger points.

The VR therapy is also being used in similar programs to help PTSD sufferers, such as emergency response workers and victims of military sexual assault.

“What we’re doing is focused on members of the military, but everything we’re doing is scalable for other people in the population,” he said.

Meek is a finance guy by profession, but he started his non-profit when he was asked for help. He’d been looking for a way to help after being near Ground Zero on 9/11.

“One of my most lasting memories of that day is the hundreds of first responders rushing into the Towers as thousands of us were going to the Brooklyn Bridge or the Upper East Side,” he said. “So I knew at some point I had to do something.”

Meek didn’t know then what it would be or when.

A few years after 9/11, Meek was approached by a buddy who was a Marine and knew a serviceman stationed in Afghanistan who was asking for tube socks and baby wipes — two essential items to U.S. service members serving in the Middle East.

“They hike all day, so they go through lots of socks then throw them out, and the baby wipes were how they took a shower,” Meek said.

Meek started sock drives, which quickly grew and were being held across the country, and he co-founded the non-profit SoldierStrong in 2009 to support that initiative.

As the number of deployed troops began to dwindle, Meek’s organization began to focus on scholarships for those who were returning.

That resulted in the creation of SoldierStrong’s mission: Helping service members take their next steps forward. With a history that started with tube socks, it was apropos.

“We started with steps on the battlefield and then moved to steps in job training and education,” Meek said.

The next evolutionary step for SoldierStrong was becoming involved with an exoskeleton device that enables a paralyzed person to stand and walk again.

“We’re doing the literal sense of our mission statement of helping service members take their literal next steps,” he said.

SoldierStrong now funds five different medical devices and is focused on finding revolutionary technology.

“We don’t just want to put a veteran in a better wheelchair. We want to help them walk again,” he said.

The exoskeleton allows the user to be at eye-level with the world again, which is also having an amazing result on the mental health of its users.

“So far the results of that are astounding,” Meek said. “One veteran we work with said, ‘I’m the tallest 5-foot-7 guy you’ll ever meet.’”

Results like that inspired Meek and those at SoldierStrong to wonder what else they could do to help with the mental health of veterans.

Meek was looking for revolutionary solutions and came across technology at the University of Southern California, which Albert “Skip” Rizzo, Ph.D., had been developing for the past few years. SoldierStrong staff thought the program was just what they were looking for and started the StrongMind initiative earlier this year.

“It’s our 10-year anniversary next month,” Meek said. “If someone had told me 10 years ago that I would go from packing socks in my driveway to coming to Iowa State to meet with the best minds in mental health, I would have asked what they were drinking.”

SoldierStrong, working with the VA Innovation Center, has identified major research-focused VA clinics at which to begin deploying the StrongMind VR PTSD protocol. As more resources become available and more clinical testing is completed, SoldierStrong will expand deployment of the protocol to VA centers around the country.

SoldierStrong Donates State-of-the-Art Exoskeleton to the Veterans Affairs Phoenix Health Care System

SoldierStrong donated an EksoGT Suit exoskeleton to the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health Care System today.

“This is an incredible day for our veterans,” said Rima Nelson, director of the Phoenix VA Health Care System. “We’re beyond grateful for this generous donation that will make such a difference in the lives of our veterans as they continue their rehabilitation.”

U.S. Army Reserves veteran Dan Rose, who was paralyzed from the chest down when an 1,100-pound improvised explosive device (IED) was detonated near him while on patrol in Afghanistan in 2011, demonstrated the exoskeleton that will be used by patients at the Carl T. Hayden VA Medical Center.

Noting the exoskeleton has provided significant physical and mental health benefits for him, Rose predicted others would experience similar results.

“I had given up on walking and thought of it as a pipe dream, so to be able to stand on my own two feet and walk across a room was a very emotional experience. The first time I stood up I realized I’d forgotten what it was like to be eye level with everyone. It was like standing on top of a mountain,” said Rose, who will throw out the first pitch at tonight’s Arizona Diamondbacks-New York Yankees game at Chase Field. “I guarantee that this donation will change lives because it will provide a spark of hope and rekindle enthusiasm for the future.”

Since the nonprofit’s inception following the tragic events of 9/11, SoldierStrong has donated more than $3 million of medical devices to help injured veterans. Today’s donation marks the organization’s 20th exoskeleton donation. It is the 16th exoskeleton donation to the VA system.

“Today’s contribution marks a significant milestone. It represents a doubling of our initial commitment to donate 10 such high-tech medical devices to benefit our country’s injured veterans,” said Chris Meek, SoldierStrong co-founder. “We’re extremely proud to help as many veterans as we can so that they will experience the physical and emotional benefits of standing and walking again.”

Nationwide, the Department of Veterans Affairs has been studying the impact that exoskeletons have in rehabilitation and on the physical well-being and mental health of paralyzed veterans. Of particular interest is whether the loss of bone density and muscle atrophy can be slowed or reversed as patients make regular use of the devices to move around.