DoD Hearing Restoration Focused Applied Research Award | W81XWH 18 HRRP FARA

Opportunity Information: Apply for W81XWH 18 HRRP FARA

The DoD Hearing Restoration Focused Applied Research Award (FY18 HRRP FARA) is a Department of Defense funding opportunity designed to push forward practical, applied research aimed at a specific and increasingly recognized problem: people who appear to have "normal" hearing sensitivity on standard tests, yet still struggle significantly to listen, follow conversations, and understand speech, especially in challenging environments. The opportunity targets auditory dysfunction often described as synaptopathy, hidden hearing loss, or central auditory processing disorders, conditions that can be caused or worsened by loud noise exposure like that experienced in combat zones, training ranges, aviation and vehicle operations, and other high-noise military or industrial settings. The key issue is that these impairments can seriously degrade real-world communication and situational awareness while escaping detection by conventional audiograms, creating both health consequences for the individual and operational risks for units and missions.

A central emphasis of the award is improved diagnosis and assessment. The program highlights an urgent need for validated, reliable tools and methods that can detect and characterize these hard-to-measure listening deficits. Importantly, the DoD is not only looking for sophisticated laboratory measures; it explicitly calls for techniques that can be used by non-specialists such as physician assistants, medics, or corpsmen. The goal is to enable rapid screening and assessment in operational or austere environments like a Forward Operating Base or a Battalion Aid Station, where time, equipment, and specialist access may be limited. In practical terms, the award is aimed at making it feasible to evaluate whether a Service member is experiencing communication-limiting auditory dysfunction and to support decisions related to combat readiness and safety.

Beyond screening, the opportunity also seeks approaches that identify what part of the auditory system is affected. Because "hidden" auditory problems can stem from different underlying mechanisms, the program stresses the importance of pinpointing which components of the auditory pathway are damaged, whether that is peripheral synaptic damage between hair cells and auditory nerve fibers (often discussed under synaptopathy) or more central processing deficits associated with central auditory processing disorders. This focus on localization and mechanism is meant to move the field beyond simply noting that someone struggles to understand speech, toward understanding why they struggle and how best to address it.

The award also supports the development of interventions, meaning treatments or mitigation strategies tailored to the type of damage involved. This can include work aimed at treating synaptopathy, addressing central processing problems, or otherwise reducing the functional impact of these conditions on speech understanding and communication performance. The underlying theme is translational usefulness: research should be applied and geared toward outputs that can realistically improve detection, decision-making, and outcomes for affected individuals, rather than remaining purely exploratory.

From a programmatic standpoint, this is a discretionary research and development funding opportunity offered by the Department of Defense, Department of the Army, administered through USAMRAA. Funding instruments include grants and cooperative agreements. Eligibility is described as unrestricted, meaning a broad range of applicant types may apply (subject to any additional eligibility language in the full announcement). The opportunity number is W81XWH-18-HRRP-FARA. The original posting date was May 30, 2018, with an original closing date of November 8, 2018. The expected number of awards was three, and the listed award ceiling was shown as 0 in the source data, which typically indicates that applicants should rely on the full announcement for budget constraints or that a fixed ceiling was not specified in that particular summary field.

Finally, while the driving motivation is military readiness and safety, the DoD makes clear that successful tools, tests, and treatments would likely have broad civilian benefits. The same kinds of hard-to-diagnose listening problems affect many people outside the military, and advances supported through this mechanism could improve prevention, diagnostic access, and hearing health care, especially for individuals in rural, remote, or otherwise resource-limited settings where specialist care and advanced audiology services are not easily available.

• The Department of Defense, Dept. of the Army -- USAMRAA in the science and technology and other research and development sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "DoD Hearing Restoration Focused Applied Research Award" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 12.420.
• This funding opportunity was created on May 30, 2018.
• Applicants must submit their applications by Nov 08, 2018. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 3 candidate(s).
• Eligible applicants include: Unrestricted (i.e., open to any type of entity above), subject to any clarification in text field entitled Additional Information on Eligibility.

Apply for W81XWH 18 HRRP FARA

[Watch] Creating a grant proposal using the step-by-step wizard inside the applicant portal: