SPEEAD Sporting Prosthetics

SPEEAD - Sporting Prosthetics for Everyday and Elite Athletes with a Disability - is an innovative approach which has already benefitted professional healthcare practitioners and people who use prostheses. Sarah Deans, SPEEAD's project manager and HPC registered prosthetics lecturer said, "With the Commonwealth Games being hosted in Glasgow in 2014, we have had the opportunity to start building on a sporting prosthetics foundation at the National Centre for Prosthetics and Orthotics. The SPEEAD project has seen two objectives come to fruition; to develop a collaborative network of sports-related specialists who will contribute to postgraduate courses and CPD events; and to deliver an awareness-raising conference for the UK research and practitioner community and master classes for users of prostheses.

The collaboration has built the level and nature of expertise and research capacity in the wider disability sports community and the project steering group includes researchers from key prosthetics industry partners. Sarah will be conducting doctoral research examining the profile of disability sports in the United Kingdom, supported by two commercially-based Masters research associates who will investigate a range of sporting prosthetics specialties.  Ultimately, the work will benefit commercial collaborators, the prosthetics profession, the academic community and most importantly the amputee user of sporting prostheses. The National Centre is looking forward to its second year of SPEEAD research activity and collaborating further with national and international sporting prosthetics partners.

The SPEEAD work in 2009 has been made possible by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the University of Strathclyde’s Collaborative Training Account (CTA). This funding has been gratefully received, the SPEEAD report to the CTA is available below.

2008-2009 Sustainable Strategic Partnerships of Scale: CTA/SPEEAD Final Report