Planning Grant: Engineering Research Center for Adaptive Small-systems for data Analytic Pain Management (ERC-ASAP)

工程研究中心规划拨款竞赛是ERC项目的试点征集。规划补助金不需要作为ERC竞赛的一部分，但它旨在在团队之间建立能力，以规划聚合的、中心规模的工程研究。美国国家医学院医学研究所（IOM）估计，美国每年有1.16亿人受到疼痛的影响，每年给国家造成数千亿美元的损失。慢性疼痛尤其难以治疗，因为疼痛是一种复杂的体验，不是单一因素的结果。更好地理解疼痛状况的复杂性的关键是识别它所造成的生物变化。用于数据分析疼痛管理的自适应小系统工程研究中心（ERC-ASAP）建议在身体的几个部位放置小型化的自主传感系统。这将允许同时监测跨多个器官的生物活动，从而深入了解慢性疼痛的原因及其发作。这笔拨款用于规划活动，以建立拟议的中心，有可能导致新的突破性技术的诊断和监测，可能改变国家的疼痛管理格局。NSF ERC-ASAP计划资助的活动将允许管理结构的发展和多学科团队的组建。规划拨款活动还将包括不同的利益相关者社区成员，这是有效融合工程实践所必需的。该中心的目标是让主要利益攸关方社区的代表参与建设性对话，以确定挑战和解决办法。一个主要的成果将是与积极的、持续的用户社区协作和投资共同发展中心的使命和目标。专家指导的利益相关者参与研讨会将与机构和行业合作者以及医学专家、系统工程师和数据科学家、卫生专业人员、决策和社会行为科学家以及联邦监管机构建立并建立强有力的伙伴关系。此外，一项全州范围的在线调查和问卷将在卫生服务社区内进行，以确定设备驱动工程方法的具体挑战、交付、治疗选择和付款模式。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The Planning Grants for Engineering Research Centers competition was run as a pilot solicitation within the ERC program. Planning grants are not required as part of the full ERC competition, but intended to build capacity among teams to plan for convergent, center-scale engineering research.The National Academy of Medicine's Institute of Medicine (IOM) estimates that 116 million people in the United States are impacted by pain every year, at an annual cost to the country in the hundreds of billion dollars. Chronic pain conditions are particularly difficult to treat, since pain is a complex experience that is not the result of a single factor. The key to better understand the complexity of pain conditions is to identify the biological changes it creates. The Engineering Research Center for Adaptive Small-systems for data Analytic Pain management (ERC-ASAP) proposes to place miniaturized autonomous sensing systems in several areas of the body. This will allow simultaneous monitoring of biological activities across multiple organs, providing insight into the causes of chronic pain and its onset. This grant enables planning activities to establish the proposed Center, potentially leading to new breakthrough technologies for diagnosis and monitoring that could alter the national pain management landscape.The activities of the NSF ERC-ASAP Planning Grant will allow for the development of the management structures and multi-disciplinary team formation. Planning grant activities will also include a diverse set of stakeholder community members, necessary for effective convergent engineering practices. The center goals are to engage representatives from the main stakeholder community for constructive dialogues to identify challenges and solutions. One major outcome will be to co-develop the center mission and goals with active, continuous user community collaboration and investment. Expert-guided stakeholder engagement workshops will build and establish a strong partnership with institutional and industrial collaborators, as well as medical experts, systems engineers and data scientists, health professionals, decision and social behavior scientists, and federal regulators. In addition, a state-wide online survey and questionnaire will be conducted within the health service community to identify specific challenges, delivery, treatment options, and payer models for a device-driven engineering approach.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.