QL Plus

Injured veterans and emergency responders submit functional challenges to Project S.E.R.V.E. when commercial prosthetics and VA programs produce devices for broad markets rather than for specific individual needs, and university engineering teams design and build one-of-a-kind adaptive devices as senior capstone projects.

ENABLE Model location

• Builder-side Interventions → Design Accessible Experiences
• Builder-side Interventions → Develop Accessible Implementations
• Builder-side Interventions → Set Requirements that Include Accessibility
• Builder-side Interventions → Provision Resources for Accessibility

What it is

Jon Monett, a former U.S. Air Force officer and 26-year CIA veteran, founded QL Plus in 2009 with a $500,000 personal investment to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.¹² The organization, rebranded as Project S.E.R.V.E. (Student Engineering for Resilience of Veterans and Emergency Responders) in September 2025, pairs injured veterans and first responders with university engineering teams that build custom assistive devices as senior capstone projects.³

Veterans submit functional problems, specific activities or tasks they cannot perform because no available device addresses their injury. Staff vet each request for a gap the commercial market does not meet, assign selected challenges to a partner university, and use the capstone calendar to move from fall design to spring build and testing.⁴⁵ Students receive course credit through the existing capstone structure, and the nonprofit provisions all material costs, shipping, and travel, approximately $25,000 per project, that the veteran would otherwise carry.⁴⁵

Project S.E.R.V.E. completes roughly 50 to 60 projects per year across 25 partner universities, including Cal Poly SLO, Virginia Tech, the University of Colorado Boulder, San Diego State, George Mason, and the University of Dayton, and reports 480+ projects completed, 1,300+ veterans served, and 2,000+ students reached since 2009.⁶⁷ Cal Poly reported that teams built sport-specific prosthetics for surfing, sled hockey, and competitive bobsled, voice-controlled vehicle transmission systems, one-handed guitar pick attachments for prosthetic arms, wheelchair luggage carriers, automated fishing systems for veterans with limited hand function, and a head-switch-operated dice roller enabling tabletop game participation for quadriplegic veterans.⁸⁹

Why it matters

After World War II, the VA built one of the largest prosthetics systems in the world to serve a mass casualty population with standardized injury profiles, amputations at common limb levels treated through centralized clinical protocols, a history McAleer traces in the Journal of Rehabilitation Research & Development.¹⁰¹¹ The commercial prosthetics industry grew alongside that system. Manufacturers supplied what the VA purchased in volume, and the VA purchased devices calibrated to clinical restoration for the broadest possible patient population. This alignment between federal procurement and commercial production established a default that has governed the field for eighty years. Manufacturers restore basic function for the largest number of patients and leave everything else to custom fabricators or individual adaptation.¹⁰¹¹ The 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act extended public accommodation requirements but created no obligation for manufacturers to produce individualized goods. The Assistive Technology Act funds state AT programs but does not mandate custom device production. Federal law built a floor for access to existing products, not a structure for manufacturing what does not yet exist. Veterans of the post-9/11 wars, many surviving injuries that would have been fatal in earlier conflicts, encountered a prosthetics market whose requirement-setting floor still demanded volume production rather than individual fabrication.¹² QL Plus emerged in 2009 to fill the gap that this arrangement left open, routing one-off functional problems to university engineering teams that had no commercial obligation to consider volume.

Commercial and VA-issued devices present veterans with available options, and veterans adapt to those options through user workarounds, switching to alternatives, or enduring the functional gap. Project S.E.R.V.E. reverses that dynamic. The veteran defines the functional problem, and engineers solve the problem the veteran articulated.⁴⁵ But university calendars and faculty mentors make access to that reversal depend on a project request that survives selection. Veterans who need the device still endure inaccessibility while they wait, and they often rely on human help from staff, mentors, family members, and student teams to translate a functional problem into a buildable specification.⁴⁵ The organization has not published outcomes data, independent evaluations, or selection criteria for which veterans receive projects, so the degree to which this inversion holds through the full design process remains undocumented.⁴⁵

Ottobock, Ossur, and Hanger Clinic dominate the U.S. prosthetics market and engineer product lines around common amputation patterns at production scale. A below-knee running blade or microprocessor knee joint generates sales volume that justifies engineering and manufacturing investment. A prosthetic designed for a specific surf break, or a single-arm bobsled steering mechanism for one competitive para-athlete, does not. VA's Rehabilitation and Prosthetic Services provides "the most advanced medical devices and products that are commercially available," a scope that excludes devices that do not yet exist commercially.¹⁰ Veterans who cannot access the program absorb the adaptation tax in three forms, paying a custom fabricator, abandoning the activity, or carrying the functional limitation permanently. Project S.E.R.V.E. removes that tax for the veterans it serves, shifting the cost onto a nonprofit budget, donor support, and student labor. The organization's own leadership has said that "hundreds of thousands of veterans and first responders... still need our help."³ Five full-time staff coordinating 25 universities and 50 to 60 projects annually operate at a fraction of the addressable need. FY2024 financials show expenses of $850,971 against revenues of $489,531, a deficit the organization covers through asset drawdown, with no government grants.¹³

Veterans ask Project S.E.R.V.E. for hiking prosthetics, kayak and bike lifts, wheelchair tire cleaners, specialized archery equipment, rollerblading attachments, guitar pick adapters, fishing rigs, bobsled steering, and other activity-specific devices that carry identity back into daily life.⁴⁵⁸ Mike Oliver argues in The Politics of Disablement that disablement grows from social organization rather than individual deficit, and Nirmala Erevelles argues in Disability and Difference in Global Contexts that disability reflects the same material conditions that concentrate race and class exclusion.¹¹¹⁴ Havlin, Molyneaux, and Murray found in Prosthesis that sport participation after limb loss rebuilt belonging, normality, connection, and personal identity for amputees, the same language veterans use when they ask for a device that lets them return to a valued activity.¹⁵

Prosthetic sockets can trap heat and perspiration, which raises discomfort and limits prosthesis use, and lower social support after limb loss can predict later depressive symptoms. Diment, Thompson, and Bergmann found in their 2019 study in the Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials that lower-limb prosthesis users experienced greater thermal discomfort on the amputated side during exercise, and Anderson et al. found in American Journal of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation that lower activities of daily living combined with lower social support predicted depressive symptoms one year after amputation.¹⁶¹⁷ The VA's National Veterans Sports Programs exist because the department found that adaptive recreation reduces depression and PTSD severity, improves social connection, and lowers isolation risk in injured veterans.¹⁸ When the gap in individualized assistive devices forces a veteran to abandon surfing, competitive para-sport, or playing an instrument, the downstream effects follow. Social isolation, loss of structure, and the psychological costs of an identity foreclosed by unavailable equipment rather than by the injury itself compound the original functional gap. Project S.E.R.V.E. builds activity-specific devices to keep bodies in motion, but the public record does not describe a follow-up clinical pathway or staffed repair and support channel that would track long-term wear after handoff.⁴⁵¹⁶

Each Project S.E.R.V.E. device gets built once for one person. The organization states that intellectual property rights typically belong to students and that patents are sometimes pursued for organizational sustainability, but no documented case exists in which a prototype reached commercial manufacture or became available to other veterans with the same functional need.⁵ No documented maintenance or repair pathway exists after delivery. Project S.E.R.V.E. moves the frontier from no solution to a custom-built device delivered at no cost through a national university network, but the structural condition it responds to, the market gap between commercial prosthetics production and individualized functional need, remains in place after each project concludes.⁶⁴

Real-world examples

In the news

Custom adaptive devices built for Veterans, at no cost (March 2026)
-- U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

• VA describes Project S.E.R.V.E. as a no-cost partner for Veterans who need devices that improve mobility, independence, or participation in activities they enjoy. VA now refers Veterans to the program for needs outside the standard benefit menu, under the Project S.E.R.V.E. name adopted in the 2025 rebrand.¹⁹

In the news

Program assists injured or disabled Veterans with custom devices to improve quality of life (March 2025)
-- U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

• VA's earlier feature on QL Plus names 25 partner universities, a fall-semester design phase, a spring build phase, and no cost to the Veteran.²⁰

• Taylor Morris, a Navy EOD officer who lost parts of all four limbs to an IED in Afghanistan in 2012, received multiple devices through Cal Poly's QL Plus lab. One team built an adaptive trailer hitch system enabling him to independently switch between three trailer sizes using his single prosthetic hand. A second team built a prosthetic socket cooling system using an embedded Peltier network to manage heat during physical activity. Morris: "This definitely lightens the work load. It allows me to do a lot more."²¹⁸
• David Snypes Jr., an Army veteran, received the first one-armed bobsled steering mechanism through a Virginia Tech Project S.E.R.V.E. team, for a sport where no commercial steering adaptation existed before the project.⁹
• Shane Heath, an Army veteran who lost his arm, received a guitar pick adapter built for his prosthetic arm. No commercial product addressed his specific setup.⁹
• Virginia Tech engineering students won the 2025 QL Plus National Design Competition for a dual active/passive cooling system integrated into a prosthetic socket liner, addressing overheating in lower-limb amputees during physical activity, a documented barrier to prosthetic use.²²
• San Diego State University students built an automated push-button casting and reeling system for veterans with incomplete quadriplegia and a head-switch-operated automatic dice roller enabling tabletop game participation for quadriplegic veterans, both presented at SDSU's Design Day 2025.²³
• Tyler Wilson, an Army veteran paralyzed after being shot, challenged University of Colorado Boulder students to design a collapsible wheelchair luggage carrier. Students built a device weighing 18 pounds and holding 50 pounds, tested across 160 trials with 30 subjects.²⁴
• The CTA Foundation awarded Project S.E.R.V.E. a $25,000 grant in 2025 to fund new assistive technology work for veterans and first responders, and the organization still relies on grant support rather than a commercial sales model.²⁵

In the news

Central Coast engineering students invent device to help severely injured veteran (July 2019)
-- KCLU

• Cal Poly students built an adaptive trailer hitch system and a prosthetic socket cooling device for Navy veteran Taylor Morris after his Afghanistan injuries. Morris: "That's how you can tell the QL+ program really cares. They're not just getting a photo opp."²¹

What care sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Care at the design and development stage starts from the person's own description of what they cannot do.

• "Tell us the activity you want back, and we will see whether a capstone team can build it."
• "The criteria is that the solution must be one not currently on the commercial market."⁴
• "We will keep the device at no cost to you, including travel if measurements require an in-person visit."¹⁹²⁰
• "So we'll give you nine months. But you've got to come up with a solution, build it, produce it and give it to the challenger." -- Jon Monett, QL Plus founder²

What neglect sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Neglect at the commercial design and production level means treating individualized need as out of scope.

• "We don't build one-of-a-kind. Our R&D budget goes toward products we can sell at volume."
• "The VA will handle it. That's what the benefit system is for."
• "If there were a market for it, someone would have built it already."
• "We can accommodate most users with our standard configurations."
• "Custom fabrication is available through a private fabricator, but it's not covered."
• "Our warranty doesn't apply to modified or non-standard uses."

What compensation sounds like (navigator-side compensations)

Compensation describes the labor injured veterans carry when individualized assistive devices do not exist commercially and no program fills the gap.

• "I just stopped surfing after I came home. There's no foot for that. I looked."
• "I asked the VA and they said they cover what's commercially available. What I need isn't commercially available. So that was the end of that conversation."
• "The fabricator quoted me $8,000. That wasn't going to happen on a disability benefit."
• "I had someone drive me to the trailhead and then I waited while everyone else went up. Every time."
• "I've been doing it one-handed for two years. You figure out workarounds, but it takes twice as long and you drop things."
• "I filled out the application and never heard back. I assume they had more challengers than available projects that year."

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All observations occur within the context of adaptive assistive device design in the United States, where commercial prosthetics manufacturers and VA benefit programs address clinical restoration for large populations and leave individualized recreational and quality-of-life functional needs to nonprofit workarounds, custom fabricators, and patient endurance.

Footnotes

1. Cal Poly Alumni. "Jon N. Monett." https://alumni.calpoly.edu/honored-alumni/jon-n-monett ↩

2. Patch McLean. "McLean Volunteer Jon Monett Helping Veterans." https://patch.com/virginia/mclean/mclean-volunteer-jon-monett-helping-veterans ↩ ↩²

3. Project S.E.R.V.E. "QL Plus Rebrands as Project S.E.R.V.E. to Better Reflect the Mission of Engineering Solutions for Veterans and Emergency Responders." https://projectserve.org/news/ql-plus-rebrands-as-project-serve-to-better-reflect-the-mission-of-engineering-solutions-for-veterans-and-emergency-responders ↩ ↩²

4. Project S.E.R.V.E. "How It Works." https://projectserve.org/how-it-works ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹

5. Podfeet Podcasts. "CSUN 2025 QL Plus Interview." https://www.podfeet.com/blog/2025/05/csun-2025-ql-plus/ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

6. Project S.E.R.V.E. "Project S.E.R.V.E. | Nonprofit for veterans and emergency responders." https://projectserve.org/ ↩ ↩²

7. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Office of Research and Development. "Prosthetics/Limb Loss." https://www.research.va.gov/topics/Prosthetics.cfm ↩

8. Cal Poly. "Students in Quality of Life Plus Lab Take On Challenges Posed by Wounded Veterans." https://www.calpoly.edu/news/students-quality-life-plus-lab-take-challenges-posed-wounded-veterans ↩ ↩² ↩³

9. Project S.E.R.V.E. "Featured Projects." https://projectserve.org/featured-projects ↩ ↩² ↩³

10. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. "Prosthetics and Sensory Aids Service." https://www.prosthetics.va.gov/ ↩ ↩² ↩³

11. McAleer, James. "Mobility redux: Post-World War II prosthetics and functional aids for veterans, 1945 to 2010." Journal of Rehabilitation Research & Development 48, no. 2 (2011). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21480083/ ↩ ↩² ↩³

12. U.S. Veterans Magazine. "Engineering a Difference: Student Engineers Supporting Injured Veterans." https://usveteransmagazine.com/usvm/engineering-a-difference-student-engineers-supporting-injured-veterans/ ↩

13. CauseIQ. "QL Plus Program Financials." https://www.causeiq.com/organizations/ql-plus-program,270172688/ ↩

14. Erevelles, Nirmala. Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a Transformative Body Politic. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. ↩

15. Havlin, Heather, Victoria Molyneaux, and Craig D. Murray. "Identity and Sport Participation Following Limb Loss: A Qualitative Study." Prosthesis 7, no. 3 (2025). https://www.mdpi.com/2673-1592/7/3/49 ↩

16. Diment, Laura E., Mark S. Thompson, and Jeroen H. M. Bergmann. "Comparing thermal discomfort with skin temperature response of lower-limb prosthesis users during exercise." Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials 2019. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6839397/ ↩ ↩²

17. Anderson, Derek R., Danielle S. Roubinov, Aaron P. Turner, Rhonda M. Williams, Daniel C. Norvell, and Joseph M. Czerniecki. "Perceived Social Support Moderates the Relationship Between Activities of Daily Living and Depression After Lower Limb Loss." American Journal of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation 2020. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7560942/ ↩

18. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. "National Veterans Sports Programs and Special Events." https://www.va.gov/adaptive-sports/ ↩

19. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. "Custom adaptive devices built for Veterans, at no cost." VA News, March 10, 2026. https://news.va.gov/145407/custom-adaptive-devices-built-veterans-no-cost/ ↩ ↩²

20. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. "Program assists injured or disabled Veterans with custom devices to improve quality of life." VA News, March 4, 2025. https://news.va.gov/138701/program-veterans-custom-devices-improve-quality/ ↩ ↩²

21. KCLU. "Central Coast engineering students invent device to help severely injured veteran." https://www.kclu.org/science-technology/2019-07-17/central-coast-engineering-students-invent-device-to-help-severely-injured-veteran ↩ ↩²

22. Project S.E.R.V.E. "Virginia Tech Design Competition 2025." https://projectserve.org/news/virginia-tech-design-competition-2025 ↩

23. Project S.E.R.V.E. "SDSU Design Day 2025." https://projectserve.org/news/sdsu-design-day-2025 ↩

24. University of Colorado Boulder, Mechanical Engineering. "Veterans Challenge CU Boulder Capstone Students to Design for Improved Quality of Life." https://www.colorado.edu/mechanical/2019/04/22/veterans-challenge-cu-boulder-capstone-students-design-improved-quality-life ↩

25. Project S.E.R.V.E. "QL Plus Receives $25,000 Grant from the CTA Foundation to Advance Assistive Technology Innovation." https://projectserve.org/news/cta-foundation-grant-2025 ↩