IUCRC Phase II UMBC: Building Reliable Advances and Innovation in Neurotechnology (BRAIN)

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Disability is becoming a leading healthcare concern because of the increase in survivable trauma and an aging population. Millions of adults live with neurological disorders, brain injury, mental illness, limb loss or paralysis. There is a need for accessible technologies that can more effectively address the care and rehabilitation needs of these patients. However, innovation in neurotechnology faces several challenges: The pace of innovation exceeds the rate of evaluation for acceptable performance; standards for the validation of safety, efficacy, and reliability of neurotechnology are lagging; current technologies are costly, limiting their deployment for treatment of disabilities; and the need to train new generations of physicians and engineers in emerging technologies steadily increases.The Industry University Cooperative Research Center for Building Reliable Advances and Innovations in Neurotechnology (IUCRC BRAIN) will address the above challenges. The Center's vision is built on a convergent research approach to the design and validation of reliable, ethical, patient-centered neurotechnologies and their use in understanding neural systems. BRAIN leverages wide-ranging expertise from neural, cognitive and rehabilitation engineering to neurorobotics, neuromodulation, and ethical artificial intelligence to enhance the rate of development and empirical validation of new neurotechnologies through partnerships with industry and other strategic partners while developing a highly skilled workforce; evaluating the impact of these technologies on quality of life; and integrating knowledge across disciplines, such as the humanities, with neurotechnologies to understand collective intelligence, and augment physical and cognitive capabilities.The Center's mission is multifold: to accelerate the progress of science and advance the national health by transferring neurotechnology to end users and to promote access for underrepresented minorities in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) by broadening new participation and retaining current participants. BRAIN will address problems in the neurological space that disproportionately affect underrepresented groups. BRAIN will become a neurotechnology hub by creating a pipeline from discoveries to solutions, while helping students, scientists, and engineers solve one of the greatest unmet medical and healthcare needs of our time.The University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) site, a Partner Site of the BRAIN Center complements existing strength and expands research into new areas such as Cyber Human Systems/Human Centered Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Neural Signal Processing, Neural Imaging and Stimulation, and Virtual/Augmented/Mixed Reality. Thus, UMBC has specific technological (introducing new research areas), collaborative (combined projects with existing BRAIN sites), and resourceful (involving northeast biomedical industry and top national and international medical centers and close proximity to federal agencies and institutes such as NSF, NIH, NIDA, FDA and NASA) contributions. The Center will maintain a project repository (https://nsfbrain.org/) comprised of products and services for 10 years after the completion of this project.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.