It’s actually good news for your grandma: DARPA is relatively keen on turning research into products. Most of their proposals ask about commercialization plans, how you’ll handle regulatory approval, etc. Their goal is to get stuff to a point where the DoD can buy 100,000 of something off the shelf. Other funding agencies (e.g., the NIH) are less interested in that and would rather see more papers and citations.

DARPA is also a bit more adventurous in what they’ll fund. I’m not sure the NIH or NSF would have picked up any of the projects I worked on without preliminary data (which we needed the money to generate so...)