Getting ideas from inside someone's head to prototype is often much harder than it appears. A new grant for the Life Beyond Barriers looks to ease that burden.
Life Beyond Barriers is an initiative between Wayne State University and downtown Detroit-based tech firm Urban Science. The idea behind it is to combine medicine, science, engineering and entrepreneurship to enhance the quality of life for the injured and disabled.
It now will receive an annual donation of up to $15,000 to fund prototype design and development at Wayne State University's biomedical engineering undergraduate design laboratory. That small amount of money is expected to enable the production of about 15 prototypes per year.
"Many times the need is real but the group that has the need doesn't have the money to invest in development of the technology," says Michele Grimm, undergraduate program chair for bio-medical engineering at Wayne State University.
Some of that prototyping is already underway. One of the projects will help create a weight-lifting set for people in wheelchairs. That concept is also in the early stages of being developed into a business at the Blackstone LaunchPad program at Wayne State.
"It will be easier for a person in a wheelchair to do resistance training," says Michele Grimm, undergraduate program chair for bio-medical engineering at Wayne State University.
Source: Michele Grimm, undergraduate program chair for bio-medical engineering at Wayne State University
Writer: Jon Zemke
Read more about Metro Detroit's growing entrepreneurial ecosystem at SEMichiganStartup.com.
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