Human-Machine Systems for Physical Rehabilitation

国家迫切需要进行先进的研究，为残疾人开发技术。一些最棘手的挑战包括恢复感觉运动协调以防止跌倒，在瘫痪后恢复运动功能，以及在创伤后再生肌肉。尽管开发了令人印象深刻的设备，但残疾人放弃辅助技术的比例高得惊人，这主要是因为他们的观点没有被纳入开发过程。辅助技术越来越多地与人类、伦理、法律、心理和社会因素交织在一起。与此同时，残疾人团体寻求参与研究过程，以阐明这些问题。在这种背景下，迄今为止，研究生工程教育在很大程度上与残疾人经历的复杂性、康复治疗教育以及研究残疾和技术对社区的更大影响的领域相隔离。此外，传统的特定学科训练抑制了跨学科思维，而跨学科思维可能导致多功能康复技术。为了解决研究生教育中的这些缺陷，这个NSF研究培训项目（NRT）将创建一个研究生培训项目，使学生能够在跨学科研究团队中工作，成功地与残疾人合作开发康复和辅助技术。该培训计划将：开发课程，教授人机系统跨视角的技能，创建一个社区，让学生沉浸在残疾的多个方面，并测试一种模式，促进跨学科的研究型合作教学。该项目的意义在于，它将为工程师、心理学家和城市专家提供一种培训模式，让他们与治疗专家和残疾人社区合作，为残疾人在日常生活中使用的最复杂的康复挑战提供技术。该项目预计将培养20名博士和10名硕士学生，其中包括15名获资助的学员，来自机械工程、电子工程、生物医学工程、计算机科学、运动科学、实验心理学和城市研究。学员将参加三个跨学科团队，其中包括有生活残疾经验的人，根据与残疾人社区合作的综合知识翻译原则。三个目标指导项目团队的工作。首先是创造物理人机交互技术，提高个人访问、参与和操纵他们的物理、社会和感官环境的能力。二是了解人类的加工和沟通，发展人工加工和沟通，使感觉运动功能有限的人能够在现实环境中从事有意义的活动（如自我喂食、梳理、烹饪）。第三是开发治疗药物，在细胞和组织水平上治疗器官缺陷。这种新颖的、以人为本的培训模式将包括设计、开发和实施技术的用户，同时扩展学生的心态和技能，以互动的方式实现这些目标。美国国家科学基金会研究实习生（NRT）计划旨在鼓励开发和实施大胆的、具有潜在变革性的STEM研究生教育培训新模式。该项目致力于通过创新、循证、适应不断变化的劳动力和研究需求的综合培训模式，在高优先级跨学科或融合研究领域对STEM研究生进行有效培训。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。

There is a compelling national need for advanced research to develop technology for people with disabilities. Some of the most vexing challenges include rehabilitating sensorimotor coordination to prevent falls, restoring motor function after paralysis, and regenerating muscle after traumatic injuries. Despite the development of impressive devices, people with disabilities abandon assistive technologies at alarmingly high rates largely because their perspectives are not included in the development process. Assistive technology is increasingly more intertwined in a web of human, ethical, legal, psychological, and social factors. Meanwhile, disability groups seek to participate in the research process to shed light on these issues. Against this background, graduate engineering education to date has been largely isolated from the complexity of disabled persons’ experiences, from rehabilitation therapy education, and from fields examining the larger impacts of disability and technology in the community. Moreover, traditional discipline-specific training inhibits transdisciplinary thinking that can lead to versatile rehabilitative technologies. To address these shortcomings in graduate education, this NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) project will create a graduate traineeship program that equips students to work on transdisciplinary research teams that successfully partner with people with disabilities to develop rehabilitation and assistive technologies. The training program will: develop courses to teach skills for spanning perspectives in human-machine systems, create a community that immerses students in multiple facets of disability, and test a model that promotes research-inspired collaborative teaching across disciplines. The significance of the program is that it will produce a traineeship model for engineers, psychologists, and urban experts to collaborate with therapy professionals and the disability community to deliver technology for the most complex rehabilitation challenges that people with disabilities use in their daily lives. The project anticipates training 20 PhD and 10 MS students, including 15 funded trainees, from Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, Exercise Science, Experimental Psychology, and Urban Studies. Trainees will participate on three transdisciplinary teams that will include people with lived disability experience according to the Integrated Knowledge Translation Principles for teaming with the disability community. Three objectives guide the project team's work. First is to create physical human-machine interaction technologies that improve individuals’ abilities to access, engage with, and manipulate their physical, social, and sensory environments. Second is to understand human processing and communication and develop artificial processing and communication to allow people with limited sensorimotor function to engage in meaningful activities (e.g., self-feeding, grooming, cooking) in realistic environments. Third is to develop therapeutic agents that are engineered to treat organ defects at a cellular and tissue level. This novel, human-centered traineeship model will include users in design, development, and implementation of technologies, while expanding students’ mindsets and skills to work interactively towards these goals.The NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) Program is designed to encourage the development and implementation of bold, new potentially transformative models for STEM graduate education training. The program is dedicated to effective training of STEM graduate students in high priority interdisciplinary or convergent research areas through comprehensive traineeship models that are innovative, evidence-based, and aligned with changing workforce and research needs.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.