A Brilliant Mind

Millions of people around the world have benefited from the inventions of biomedical engineer Rory Cooper and his innovations in assistive technology

WRITTEN BY Neil Cotiaux

It all began in an automotive repair shop in the hilly Northern California town of San Luis Obispo.

Born into a family of tinkerers and mechanics, Rory Cooper had always been a curious young man and frequently looked over his parents’ shoulders as they addressed a myriad of mechanical problems at their automotive repair shop. “I didn’t really want to be a mechanic,” Cooper recalled. “What drove me was an interest in becoming an engineer: to understand how things work and design new things, rather than fix other people’s things.”

But many members of the Cooper family had also served in the military, including his father. So young Rory joined the Army as a volunteer in 1976. Four years later, tragedy struck in Germany when a vehicle hit Cooper while he rode his bicycle. The accident damaged the 20-year-old’s spinal cord, and Cooper was paralyzed from the waist down.

Back home, he underwent intensive therapy. Along with his wife, Rosemarie, Rory’s wheelchair became the center of his life. Via the GI Bill, he was admitted to California Polytechnic State University, earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering. But San Luis Obispo was a hilly town, and Cooper said he had to do everything in his power to make it through each day. “When I got out of the hospital I weighed 80 pounds. I worked myself up to 130 pounds. I was about 160 pounds before I got injured. So an 80-pound [manual] wheelchair was a lot of weight to carry up those hills … and I just thought, ‘This can’t be right.’”

Frustrated, Cooper went to the family shop to design a lightweight wheelchair for himself. Thus began his crusade to make life better for any veteran or civilian who was, or would be, wheelchair-bound. He then went on to attain a doctorate in electrical and computer engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Equipped with specialized knowledge and a plethora of passion, Cooper gained a deeper realization of the magnitude of the issues faced by those in wheelchairs. He was determined to make things right, and on a massive scale.

An Outpouring of Ideas

“As I got advanced in my education, I learned that people were developing sores on their hands, including myself, and then wrist injuries and shoulder injuries that were making their lives more difficult,” Cooper said. He set out to reduce those repetitive injuries. The result was the invention of an ergonomic push rim requiring less forceful gripping with improved propulsion. Users reported less hand and wrist pain and fewer wrist and shoulder injuries.

In 1994, as Cooper’s work on repetitive stress was in its final stages, he co-founded Human Engineering Research Laboratories (HERL), a biomedical engineering partnership of the U.S. Department of Veterans