ARMY AL&T
THE MAGIC GLOVE
MTEC gives traction to promising technology for healing Soldier injuries.
by Ramin A. Khalili
techniques like negative pressure wound therapy are effective, but usage on the hand occasion- ally comes with just as many drawbacks as benefits. Considering the sheer amount of major hand injuries in the U.S. alone—nearly four million per year, according to Allan—the need for something better was obvious and pressing.
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“You do this long enough and you learn that the only way around the mountain is through the mountain,” said Allan, who’s since retired from clinical practice and now works as a researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. “So we set off to begin burrowing our way through the mountain.”
THE MAGIC GLOVE All of that burrowing resulted in what is now the ReHeal Glove; a bioengineered glove designed to promote faster healing in surgically-repaired hands. Developed alongside colleague Muthu Wijesundara, Ph.D., a scientist at the University of Texas at Arlington Research Institute (UTARI), the glove is now being tested by the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command’s (USAMRDC) Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs. Te mili- tary currently sees great promise in a tool with such an effective and portable profile—one with the capacity to help heal a variety of burns and other potential traumatic hand injuries. Indeed, research shows that, collectively, the hands and fingers were the second most common sites of non-battle injuries reported by service members during their deployments to Iraq or Afghani- stan from 2003 to 2004; with hand injuries standing as the third most common injury requiring evacuation. According to the same research, 96 percent of those injured were Army Soldiers.
How exactly the ReHeal Glove got to where it is now—flush with funding and undergoing various rounds of testing—is largely the result of the Medical Technology Enterprise Consor- tium (MTEC), a nonprofit corporation that operates as the premier facilitator and collaborator across the entire DOD. Indeed, if it weren’t for MTEC, the near decade-long effort to develop
fter more than two decades as a hand surgeon, Chris Allan was still looking for a solution—a way to solve a frustrating problem. Given that human hands require full, unobstructed motion to function properly, any major surgery on the area usually requires a lengthy and tedious rehabilitation process. Sure, wound care
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