Prosthetic Research Funding Tools

If we've met, I've probably discussed with you the difficulties that our community has in navigating efforts across the various funding agencies (mostly US Government), and would like to invite you (and any of your colleagues with whom I may not be familiar) to advise us on what tools and resources we might provide you to better help you publicize past, current and future research efforts and the results of that research, in the form of funding data, announcements and requests, publications and data, and help to provide you with (and help you provide others) the best situational awareness of the state of the art in both research and practice.

We are seeking to revamp the Open Prosthetics family of websites, and have submitted some grant applications and made some appeals to potential collaborators, and are in the process of deciding on features and tools to incorporate into the redesigned website. Our most important goal is to engage as many groups of stakeholders in the discussion within their existing workflow, making them more effective at what they are already trying to do, and allowing them to do more to help our community.

We seek to amplify the impact of efforts of programs like the ones you run, and the channels of communication that all of the nodes associated--including your agencies, your grantees, and, most importantly, the patients who are the actual targets of your research--have with each other and with the knowledge generated by your efforts.

This great video helps explain some of the value that new ways of harnessing the crowd can improve our interaction with each other and information. The NIH VIVO initiative promises to offer us even better semantic tools to do that, and I'd like to invite you to advise us on how we might best serve you as we help you interface with those new tools and the information they will help us access.

As a first step, I invite you to join the Open Prosthetics social network on Ning, on which we have started this group dedicated to better serving you as we follow through on our plan to revamp the OPP website and better connect the stakeholder in the prosthetic space. In order to start the discussion, I've made a few forums. Please iinvite anyone else you like to help us discuss the possibilities there.

Thanks very much for your help in improving the lives of amputees.

Best,
Jon Kuniholm