Military Advanced Training Center (MATC)
Amputee Care
We are dedicated to the care and rehabilitation of America’s sons and daughters recovering from injuries sustained in service. Our Military Advanced Training Center (MATC) is a state-of-the-art facility where service members, retirees and family members use sophisticated prosthetics and cutting-edge athletic equipment to move from injury to independence.
The MATC uses a Sports Medicine model which offers much of the same sports and exercise equipment found at the finest sports rehabilitation training rooms across the country. Many of the same fitness drills practiced by professional athletes are used to work on core strength, balance and stability.
The focus of MATC’s expert staff is to match the drive and determination of our service members— build their strength, skills and confidence, and return them to the highest level of physical, emotional, and psychological functional ability. A major goal of the MATC is to enable service members to make their own choices and not allow their futures to be dictated by their injuries.
We serve active duty and retired service members, and their families. Appointments are made by referral from the Amputee Clinic in the Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Service.
Amputee Physical and Occupational Therapy
The MATC is setting world-class standards of care and leading the way in rehabilitative and prosthetic care. The comprehensive effort of rehabilitation is where physical and occupational therapists follow the service members from their initial evaluations through discharge from the hospital, course of outpatient rehabilitation, and return to active duty or civilian life.
We offer a full range of prosthetic and orthotic services, using advanced state-of-the-art prosthetic limb technology for design, milling, and production of prosthetic devices in the Orthotics and Prosthetics Service, adjacent to the MATC. Our convenient location allows our prosthetists to work closely with the physical and occupational therapists to ensure the best possible fit and utilization of the prosthetic devices.
Recreational Therapy and Adaptive Sports
We recognize the importance of recreational and adaptive sports to well being and recovery. The Recreational Therapy staff coordinates a community reintegration program that offers a wide variety of experiences outside the clinic setting, including trips to public venues such as shopping areas, movie theaters, restaurants and museums.
The program provides adaptive sports activities such as scuba diving, therapeutic horseback riding, basketball, cycling, running and golf, which allow the patients to be challenged and helps provide meaning and purpose. Additionally, MATC patients have access to the Walter Reed Bethesda Facility Dog program.
Computer Assisted Rehab Environment (CAREN)
One of only ten of its kind in the world, the CAREN provides a safe, controlled setting where patients can work on balance, coping with stress, using new prosthetics and other skills necessary to achieve functional real-life goals. Using specialized cameras and computers linked to sensors on their bodies, recovering service members interact with a virtual world projected onto a life-sized curved screen by shifting their weight on a motion platform with an embedded treadmill. More than 70 scenarios enable recovering service members to perform virtual activities such as steering a boat through buoys in a lake, running up and down trails in the woods, or walking through city streets, without fear of falling.
Center for Performance and Clinical Research (CPCR)
The Gait Lab of the Center for Performance and Clinical Research (CPCR) uses sophisticated motion analysis equipment (27 infra-red cameras, reflective markers and six force plates) to quantify our patient's movement. The information gained through motion analysis helps providers to evaluate or modify physical therapy programs and prosthetic and orthotic components. Our ultimate goal is to facilitate improvement of functional tasks such as walking, running and jumping.