For winter para-athletes, cold exposure is an injury risk. A CU student team built a device for it, and won $15,000.

University of Colorado biomedical engineering students designed a multilayered heated residual limb warmer for cold-weather use. Their device took the Rehabilitative and Assistive Technologies Prize in the NIH DEBUT Challenge. It is a prototype, but the problem it addresses has been real for as long as winter adaptive sport has existed.

Cold weather is harder on residual limbs than on intact ones. Circulation changes after amputation; the residual limb has less tissue mass to retain heat, and the prosthetic socket can conduct cold, pulling heat away from skin that may already have reduced sensation. In extended outdoor exposure, that combination creates real injury risk: cold-related complications that can sideline an athlete, delay socket fitting, and cause lasting tissue damage.

That problem is not new. A commercial thermal management device purpose-built for residual limbs in cold-weather use has not been a market priority.

A team of biomedical engineering students at the University of Colorado just won a national prize for building one anyway.

What they built

The team goes by Buffalo H.I.D.E., for Heated Integrated Device for Extremities. Their device is a multilayered residual limb warmer designed specifically for winter para-athletes. The design draws on the construction logic of insulated sports gear: layered insulation with an integrated active heating element, built to maintain safe skin temperature during extended time outdoors.

The device took the Rehabilitative and Assistive Technologies Prize at the 2026 DEBUT Challenge, an NIH competition targeting undergraduate teams working on unmet health problems. The prize was $15,000. Out of 119 applications from 64 universities in 29 states, 14 projects won; Buffalo H.I.D.E. was one of them.

The team also brought the device to the Project S.E.R.V.E. National Design Competition, where they worked with Daniel “Doc” Jacobs, the 2026 US Para Bobsled national champion. A prototype built in collaboration with an athlete who actually trains in the cold is different from one designed entirely in a lab.

What the prize points to

The DEBUT competition judges described the device as addressing a “uniquely vulnerable population of amputees who are susceptible to cold-related injury during extended outdoor exposure.” That phrasing is accurate: the gap was recognized as a genuine problem worth a federal engineering prize. No earlier solution had already filled it well enough.

Winter Paralympic sport has grown into a real competitive structure. Para bobsled, para alpine, para biathlon, and para cross-country all exist as categories with national development tracks. Athletes in those sports deal with cold the same way any winter athlete does, except for the part involving a residual limb in a prosthetic socket, with no purpose-built thermal layer designed for that specific situation.

The $15,000 prize helps the team continue development. It is not a product launch. The device still needs further engineering, user testing across a wider range of athletes and residual limb types, and, eventually, regulatory clearance before it could reach anyone beyond the research context. Whether it gets there depends on funding, manufacturing interest, and whether anyone in the O&P supply chain decides the winter athlete population is worth serving.

The student team decided it was. The judges agreed. The market question is still open.

This article covers an early-stage research prototype, not a commercially available device. For questions about cold weather management specific to your residual limb, your prosthetist is the right starting point.