A professor at Mercer University, Macon, Georgia, has been awarded $90,000 in grants to help provide low-cost prosthetic care in developing nations through Mercer On Mission, the university’s service-based study-abroad program. The National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance awarded Ha Van Vo, MD, PhD, DPM, with a Sustainable Vision Grant of $37,275 to help him perfect his design and set up a prosthetic lab and clinic in Vietnam. The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship awarded the University a $50,000 grant to replicate the Vietnam program in Haiti. Vo is an associate research scientist in Mercer’s School of Medicine and an assistant professor in its department of Biomedical Engineering.
Vo invented a low-cost leg prosthesis that can be fitted without full customization, which makes it an affordable alternative to those in developing nations. Last summer, Vo and Ramachandran Radharamanan, PhD, a fellow professor in the school of engineering, led a Mercer On Mission team to work with Vietnamese amputees living in and around Ho Chi Minh City. In all, the team fitted 35 prostheses and cast 27 people for later fittings. According to Mercer, Vo and Radharamanan plan to return to Vietnam to complete the lab and to lead a team of students to fit those 27 people as well as 63 more amputees.
In March, Mercer’s University Minister and Dean of the Chapel Craig McMahan, who coordinates the Mercer On Mission program, traveled to Haiti to lay the groundwork for an exploratory trip in mid-May and a follow-up trip in the summer of 2010. During the exploratory trip, Vo hopes to deliver as many as 20 prostheses and, upon returning from Vietnam, will travel back to Haiti with a Mercer delegation to fit another 30 amputees. In addition to fitting the amputees, Vo reportedly hopes to work with local officials to explore ways to produce the devices in country.
According to a Mercer press release, Vo recently expanded his operations into a lab space in Mercer’s new science and engineering building, where he will be able to manufacture larger numbers of the prostheses while training Mercer students and the lab technicians who are charged with building the labs in Vietnam and Haiti. He and his students will build prostheses between trips to Haiti and Vietnam to meet the needs of as many amputees as possible, Vo said.
“We want to do whatever we can to help them,” he added.
Developing the Vietnam program is estimated to take three years, and Vo hopes to expand the program to India and Thailand in the future. The National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance grant may be used toward those efforts and for further development of the leg-prosthesis design, specifically the knee, pylon, ankle, and foot.
