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As a student in the Advancing Inclusive Manufacturing program, Joshua Kimmel helped create a truly revolutionary device.

He and a staff machinist at the Human Engineering Research Laboratories (HERL) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,  worked together to design a bicycle-style hand brake that is level with Kimmel's lap as he sits in his wheelchair. With this innovation Kimmel and other manufacturing technicians with limited mobility do not have to stretch from their wheelchair seats past moving spindles and blades to shut off the milling equipment. Dalton Relich, the machinist and technical assistant at HERL, said brakes on mills have been above the shoulders of standing operators for hundreds of years.

"That is actually why I jumped into the program so wholeheartedly—is because the difficulties I encountered while I was going through the program, working in the machine shop, I was able to sit down behind the computer and draw up and design different technologies to assist myself and maybe even future participants," Kimmel said.

In 2014 Kimmel attended the 12-week program funded with support from the National Science Foundation's Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program. Afterward he did his on-the-job training at HERL and is now employed in its machine shop. During the 2015 ATE Principal Investigators Conference he described what it was like to be a student and research subject at HERL, which since 1994 has conducted assistive technology research and designed an array of devices to improve the mobility of persons with disabilities. 

Kimmel's experience learning and working at HERL has been so encouraging that he has returned to college part time, enrolling as a math and science major at the Community College of Allegheny County. His goal is to be a mechanical engineer. He has previously taken courses in architectural and mechanical drafting.

HERL is a collaboration of the University of Pittsburgh, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and UPMC Health System. It is the mission of the Human Engineering Research Laboratories "to continuously improve the mobility and function of people with disabilities through advanced engineering in clinical research and medical rehabilitation."

Relich, who is a machinist, explained that HERL has been making prototypes of assistive devices for about 20 years before the idea blossomed among the staff to use the lab as a technical education site for people with mobility issues to gain entry-level manufacturing skills. "We have all this equipment to machine all these part, we thought, 'Why not make the machine shop accessible?' "

With NSF ATE support and funding from the Mitsubishi Electric American Foundation, HERL teaches veterans and others with mobility disabilities about fabrication technologies and how to operate 3-D printers and water jet cutters, as well as how to use machining and computer-aided design equipment. The curriculum also covers goal setting and career planning.

The AIM program is limited to five or fewer students at a time so the staff can work closely with students.

As Relich explains, the students are simultaneously research subjects and pupils who are expected to learn enough to gain entry-level manufacturing technology positions.

"We're teaching them but as we're teaching them, we are actually learning what we need to do to make their machine accessible or to change the curriculum to make it more accessible. So we're doing research on them as they're going through," he said.

Kimmel called the overlapping agendas of the program "an experience, like being a guinea pig for my own design and stuff like that when I went through the program."

Kimmel's description of how his milling machine brake comes "right down to lap height so it's real nice and convenient to turn off real quick and brake the machine" is evidence of the powerful potential that comes from engaging students with disabilities as learners, research subjects, and collaborators.