Imagine that suddenly, you've lost the ability to use your phone, a computer, a microwave. Or try to imagine that you were suddenly unable to practice your favorite hobby.

It's challenges such as these which led the Department of Veterans Affairs to hosting the first VA Innovation Creation Series for Prosthetics and Assistive Technologies, and we've been looking forward to following up on their advancesas the challenge kicks off.

It's an initiative aimed at getting engineers, designers, and problem solvers together to tackle a list of challenge areas facing veterans. The initiative hopes to build solutions using platforms like Innocentive and GrabCAD to harness the expertise, skills, and passion of the public to solve a series of problems.

The challenge hopes to take on projects like developing novel upper and lower extremity devices for the daily-use prostheses, creating a medication pillbox that can contain medications and remind users when to take their dose, creating a device to dampen tremors when someone is performing fine motor tasks, designing a device to remotely change the speed – and grip strength – of a prosthetic device for veterans with upper extremity injuries, and creating a way to reassign motions and buttons on gaming controllers to provide access to veterans and letting them be repurposed to improve eye hand coordination, fine motor control, and the range of motion.