Armenia

HERL brings
wheelchair rugby
to Armenia

 

July 2026

WATCH THE TEASER

 

 

The first wheelchair rugby game in Armenia was played in July of 2026.
The Human Engineering Research Laboratories brought 10 kirigami rugby chairs to the country, in collaboration with the Armenian Paralympic Committee, to hold Armenia's very first wheelchair rugby training camp and competition! Out of this collaboration, the Armenian Wheelchair Rugby Association was officially established.

The chairs, designed by Jessica (Steinberg) Eisenhart, were brought to Armenia as part of the NIDILRR RERC Power of Play, co-led by Ian Rice at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Rory A. Cooper, PhD, PLY at University of Pittsburgh Health Sciences. This visit was made possible with support from the U.S. Department of State's YTILI | Young Transatlantic Innovation Leaders Initiative fellowship program and Marina Davtyan.

Special thank you to the Pan-Armenian Rugby Federation for coaching the athletes! 🤝

 

FULL STORY

In mid-Summer, on a court in Yerevan, Armenia, eight athletes who had never played wheelchair rugby took the floor in chairs that had not existed just two years earlier. Two teams of four squared off in the country's first-ever wheelchair rugby game, a milestone that was years in the making, built on an unlikely combination of international fellowship, cross-continental engineering, and paper-folding.

The kirigami engineered wheelchair concept began as a design process supported by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, aimed at improving mobility devices for veterans. It was later expanded specifically toward adaptive sports equipment including tennis, basketball and rugby wheelchairs through funding from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR) under a Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) grant called "Power of Play," co-led by Ian Rice, PhD, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Cooper at the University of Pittsburgh. That project's aims specifically include designing and fabricating rugby wheelchairs using kirigami methods and validating those designs against wheelchair standards. High-end rugby wheelchairs typically cost thousands of dollars, putting them out of reach for many athletes and programs around the world, which is precisely the gap the kirigami approach was engineered to close.

Marina Davtyan, an entrepreneur and innovator from Yerevan, arrived at the Human Engineering Research Laboratories (HERL) as a fellow of the U.S. Department of State's Young Transatlantic Innovation Leaders Initiative (YTILI) in 2025. The program brings early-career innovators from Europe and Eurasia to the United States for hands-on placements with American companies, universities, and research institutions, pairing them with mentors who work in their field of interest.

At HERL, Davtyan worked alongside Rory A. Cooper, PhD, the lab's founding director, and his colleagues, who have spent decades developing technology to expand independence and athletic opportunity for wheelchair users. Davtyan's own venture, Connectra, focuses on using real-world data to improve care and outcomes for people who use prosthetics and wheelchairs, which created a natural fit for HERL whose researchers have long focused on building lightweight, highly customizable, and affordable wheelchairs.

The fellowship experience did what YTILI is designed to do: it did not end when Davtyan returned home. Instead, it became the seed for a joint venture. Davtyan and Cooper applied for and received a YTILI reciprocal exchange project, a mechanism built specifically to send American mentors abroad to continue collaborations started during the fellowship. Their proposal: bring wheelchair rugby, and the technology to play it, to Armenia for the first time.

With the YTILI reciprocal project funded, the work shifted from lab to logistics. A HERL design and fabrication team led by Jessica Steinberg built ten Kirigami-inspired and engineered rugby wheelchairs and shipped them from Pittsburgh to Yerevan. This equipment would make a new sport possible in a country that had never had access to the specialized chairs required to play it.

Cooper then led a delegation from the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to Armenia, where they were hosted by a team organized by Davtyan. The visit was built around several linked goals: strengthen the research relationship between Armenia and the United States, finish assembling and fitting the wheelchairs with input from Armenian partners and put the equipment into the hands of players and coaches.

See some photographs of the trip below, or view the whole gallery on Flickr.

Armenia | 2026

A man in a red jersey plays a game of wheelchair rugby.
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Boy and man using tools on blue wheelchair part
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Man using a drill to assemble a blue and red wheelchair.
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Several people in blue shirts work on blue wheelchairs with wheels on a concrete floor.
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Two men and a woman in a workshop, working on a blue and red wheelchair.
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Three adults assembling a blue wheelchair frame on a table.
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Three people working on a blue frame in a workshop.
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Woman working on a blue wheelchair while sitting on the floor in a workshop
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Several people working with blue wheelchairs, one woman kneeling and one man in a wheelchair.
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A young woman works on a blue whelchair in an office building.
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A group of people working on a blue wheelchair with wheels in a large room.
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A man bends over to inspect a blue and red wheelchair in a room.
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Two women working on a blue and red wheelchair.
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Woman kneeling, working on a blue and red wheelchair on a blue moving blanket.
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A man in a wheelchair helps two women to put on a seat.
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Woman holding a tool and working on a red wheelchair part.
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A person is removing the wheelchair backrest with a metal tool.
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Two men in wheelchairs on a blue mat with others in background.
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Wheelchair rugby players in a gym, one wearing jersey number 5, others watching
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Three men in wheelchairs playing a rugby game in a gym
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