Allison interviews Mark Robbins and Scott Huyvaert from Quality of Life Plus (QL Plus) about their expertise in offering personalized solutions for injured veterans. Since 2009, QL Plus has worked to enhance the quality of life of those who risked their lives to protect ours.
A nonprofit organization, QL Plus works with injured veterans and first responders to design and build a personalized engineering solution that enhances their independence, mobility, and participation in activities they love. The veteran is paired with a QL Plus program manager to pinpoint a specific injury, illness, or challenge affecting their quality of life.
The program manager develops a personalized project plan at no cost to the veteran. The project is assigned to a team of engineering students and faculty at one of the QL Plus partner universities. Over an academic year, the University Team designs and builds a customer-adaptive device, working with the veteran virtually and in person to get it right.
Learn more at https://qlplus.org/
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Transcript of Interview:
Allison: I’m in the QL Plus booth with Mark Robbins and Scott Huyvaert and you all work with people trying to help veterans, is that right?
Mark: We do. We partner with college engineering students who design and build assistive devices for veterans with disabilities. So we’ll get a veteran come to us and say I need something to help me with my everyday life, or my active lifestyle, or something different. They can’t get it through the VA or off the shelf, so they come to us, we take the ideas, we have 25 universities, and we partner with across the country. They’ll assign it to one of their teams of student engineers, they’re seniors, it’s their capstone project to finish up their graduation requirements, and at the end of the year, they come up with a prototype of something that will benefit the veteran forevermore.
Allison: That is a unique idea. I haven’t ever thought of that. Obviously, people need inspiration for ideas for their senior projects in school, and being engineers, Steve and I can both appreciate that. So you said you work with a lot of different universities, 25?
Mark: We have 25 across the country, and all top-notch engineering programs. They’re a lot of fun, and they do like our programs. What’s neat is the schools are always looking for new projects for the students to complete, but they like ours because we’re bringing in something a little bit different. We’re doing it not just for an industry widget, we’re doing something that’s really going to benefit a veteran at the end of the day.
Allison: Now, a lot of these designs I would imagine don’t just benefit veterans, but that’s the focus?
Mark: That’s the focus. Veterans and first responders, we kind of look for people who have served the country and served our communities, and that’s our way of giving back.
Allison: Okay so that’s how somebody gets in to get a product designed and maybe a prototype created that could eventually help them but other people might get the benefit but you can’t come in and just go hey I got one leg I need you to help me with this but I didn’t serve anything. It’s like no go get in the other line.
Mark: A lot of the projects are really one-offs in a lot of ways because they’re so unique that it may not be something that’s big for general consumption, but some of them are, and we’ve had some pretty neat ideas out there.
Allison: Do you want to elaborate on any of those ideas? What’s come out of these programs?
Scott: A lot of our projects are all around outdoor activities and sports for active lifestyle because our target audience comes from an active lifestyle and then they might have lost the ability to do something due to injury and our program does not require service-based injuries so it can be a non-service related injury as well and what I’ve seen a lot in the past is a lot of cycling projects. We’ve done hockey, skiing, we’ve done just, I mean, a plethora of things. Golf, we have a lot of golf projects, both traditional and frisbee golf. We’re doing billiards, we’re doing, I mean there’s really no limitation to what we can do as far as the concepts that come to us. We don’t tell a user what they need; they come to us and say we need this, so it’s really driven by the end user.
Allison: And of course, anybody who’s gone into the armed services or into being a first responder probably tends to be reasonably athletic and does things, right? They’re not people who come to you saying Hey, I sit on the couch all day and I need a new footrest.
Scott: Well, we do get a mix of applicants, and sometimes, due to their limiting disability, they unfortunately think they are gonna be stuck on the couch. So what’s unique about our program is not only do they bring us the concept and they tell us what they need and we try to achieve that, but connecting them with student teams also gives them purpose and almost energizes them to participate. So the more participation the veteran or first responder has with the team, the better outcome we typically have, and seeing that relationship, seeing that excitement of a veteran like that may have not had that excitement previously to do something and be participating in something is also beneficial.
Allison: I’m not gonna lie, that gave me chills thinking about that. I’m not kidding I’m tearing up a little bit because I’m picturing both sides of that equation — what you just described and as an engineering student to get the enthusiasm that yes, this is a field I really want to pursue and I want to make sure and they’re probably more likely to go into a field that would continue to benefit people with disabilities because of this that they’re not gonna say okay I’m gonna go make that widget that’s gonna you know be in whatever in something mainstream.
Scott: Yeah.
Allison: I would think.
Mark: Well and actually I’ve had veterans actually enroll in engineering school after going through the experience because they didn’t know that something like that existed and whether they’re with mechanical, biomechanical, electrical, a hybrid of those they get to see something that they didn’t know was available and most veterans qualify for educational benefits after their service so they can take those benefits and use them in a productive way.
Allison: Wow, this is really incredible. Have you ever worked with, like, high school robotics teams, anything like that?
Scott: So we’ve had the opportunity to pair with some high school teams. We have used high school teams in other states that were specific to more like welding and building like more mechanical than robotics, but I have met with some teams, and we’re you know always looking for opportunity.
Allison: Sure, it’s good to spark them when they’re young.
Scott: Yeah, yeah, we, you know, we do. There’s opportunity everywhere you never know where it exists, so we like to at least look at those channels and see what’s available.
Allison: So, if you’re a first responder or a veteran, how would they get involved in this program?
Mark: They just come, and they can go right on to our website, QLplus.org, and there’s a place there where they can fill out a form and tell us, you know, what’s their injury and what are they trying to achieve, what sort of device are they thinking about that we could do. We’ve come up with—they honestly say we don’t come up—they come up with it with great ideas. Some of the ones that I’ve enjoyed lately is: we had a—we work with Paralympic bobsledders, and a lot of veterans like to get into Paralympic sports because, same thing, they want to stay active and do things. And we’ve done some modifications to bobsleds to help them with their bobsledding, but we had this one guy who showed up who only had one arm. Now, typically, you need to have two arms to steer a bobsled because you have two different handles to work with, yeah, and he wanted to be a one-armed bobsledder. So we had a team at Virginia Tech who put that together and tested it at Lake Placid, and we created the first single-handed bobsled driver out there.
Allison: That is so cool, I love stuff like this, and this is fantastic.
Mark: Another one I like is taking it more on the on the day-to-day stuff we had one veteran who lost a leg and she used a wheelchair to get around but she sometimes wanted a walker and said you know I don’t want to carry two different devices so she came to us and said how can you do that you know how can I create something like that something that’s a walker and a wheelchair
Allison: Oh wow.
Mark: So we had students at George Mason University put together, basically rebuilt the wheelchair, flipped some of the handles around, had it so that you could flip the seat over. It became a bench to rest her partial leg, but also became a walker there, and she now has two devices in one, and it’s something she could convert in about 30 seconds so it wasn’t a difficult thing to do. I remember she built it and she’s using it, that she’s using it, and I remember when they were demonstrating it for us and I was looking at, I was asking the students like, ‘This is so simple,’ and they said, ‘This was the hardest thing we ever did because the simplicity is what made it so great,’ as they said. But all that, all that took for all the engineering and re-engineering of a wheelchair to turn it into another device, said it was really a tough thing.
Allison: It’s a lot easier to design something complicated than this design something simple, I think
Mark: So it was fun, they do all sorts of things. We do about 50 or 60 projects a year, so we’re trying to reach as broad a group of the veterans and first responders as we can.
Allison: So how are you funded?
Mark: All through donations – Corporate foundations and individual donors, we don’t get any government grants. We just do it on our own, and we seem to do pretty well
Allison: Okay so they should all donors should go to qlplus.org as well, right?
Mark: We’d love to have them join us.
Allison: Get to the front of that line right away. One last question, if it sounds like something like the wheelchair turning into a walker, that’s something that could easily be patentable. Who would own that patent?
Mark: We have agreements with the schools of students in us and we you know if the students want to pursue it they generally we’ve been trying to advise them work through your university because they have transfer technology offices and there’s places that can help guide that it’s an expensive and time-consuming process, so we haven’t really gone into that much ourselves but there’s been a little bit of activity out there
Allison: And I’m just trying to find out, would it be you or would it be the university or the student? It’d be over on their side?
Mark: It’ll tend to be more on the student side because even the universities often will sign away and give it their rights to the students. it’s it’s important to them to make sure the students are given the credit
Allison: 100%. Now, are you funding any of these programs at the universities?
Mark: We’d have different agreements, so sometimes we’ll provide funding for supplies and materials, other times the universities do, and then we have our small staff of five that are overseeing all the projects across the country.
Allison: Oh, this is fascinating. I’m so glad we stopped by. This is our first booth – this is QL Plus dot org
Mark: Thank you very much
Allison: Mark, this is fantastic
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