The National Rehabilitation Hospital is working closely with army doctors and veterans to improve accessibility to rehab, assistive technology, and cutting edge care for soldiers returning to life with disabilities.

WASHINGTON, June 20 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — A team of medical professionals from the National Rehabilitation Hospital is calling the U.S. Army’s rehab services in Germany impressive. The NRH team has been in Germany since last weekend to work with the US Army’s Europe Regional Medical Command (ERMC) in assessing their current rehabilitation practices.

Better in-field medical care, and better equipment means that people are surviving injuries which would have been fatal in the past. Many are returning home severely disabled, but alive and with the need to reintegrate into civilian life. All American Patriots is running a thought provoking piece on what this means to the assistive technology community, the veterans themselves, and the the caregivers and people around them.

Wounded servicemembers in need of accommodations for their visual, hearing, dexterity and cognitive disabilities are the fastest-growing group requesting assistive technologies, a senior Defense Department official said in a May 29 interview.

“Recently, we have been overwhelmed with requests from our wounded servicemembers as they are coming back and also learning that they need to have a different type of technology or can benefit from assistive technology,” Dinah Cohen, director of the department’s Computer/Electronic Accommodations Program, or CAP, said on the “Dot Mil Docs” program on BlogTalkRadio.com.

When the war on terror began, it became clear that demand for assistive technology would grow from people with established needs to others who previously had no need for the help the technologies provide, Cohen said.

“Post-9/11, it was very obvious to me as men and women were coming back from the global war on terror that many of them were coming back with devastating injuries that would benefit from the same accommodations that are used to meet the needs for people with disabilities,” Cohen said.

Dana Blankenhorn, of ZDNet, registers an opinion on what the war has done for assistive technology and what assistive technology has done for veterans. Good read, nice discussion.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Teams of university scientists backed by U.S. government funds hope to grow new skin, ears, muscles and other body tissue for troops injured in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Defense Department said on Thursday.

The $250 million effort aims to address the Pentagon’s unprecedented challenge of caring for troops returning from the war zones with multiple traumatic injuries, many of which would have been fatal years ago.

“We’ve had just over 900 people, men, some women with amputations of some kind or another since the start of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq,” said Ward Casscells, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs. Many have also suffered burns, spinal cord injuries and vision loss.

“Getting these people up to where they are functioning and reintegrated, employed, able to help their families and be fully participating members of society, this is our task,” he said.

Under the initiative, the Pentagon launched the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine made up of two teams — the first led by Wake Forest University in North Carolina and the University of Pittsburgh and the second led by Rutgers University in New Jersey and the Cleveland Clinic.