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

由于可存活创伤的增加和人口老龄化，残疾正在成为主要的医疗保健问题。数百万成年人患有神经系统疾病、脑损伤、精神疾病、肢体丧失或瘫痪。有必要提供可获得的技术，以更有效地满足这些患者的护理和康复需求。然而，神经技术的创新面临着几个挑战：创新的速度超过了可接受性能的评估速度;神经技术的安全性，有效性和可靠性的验证标准滞后;目前的技术成本高昂，限制了其在残疾治疗中的部署;在新兴技术领域培养新一代医生和工程师的需求稳步增长。工业大学建筑合作研究中心神经技术的可靠进步和创新（IUCRC BRAIN）将解决上述挑战。该中心的愿景是建立在一个收敛的研究方法，以设计和验证可靠的，道德的，以病人为中心的神经技术及其在理解神经系统的使用。BRAIN利用从神经，认知和康复工程到神经机器人，神经调节和伦理人工智能的广泛专业知识，通过与行业和其他战略合作伙伴的合作，提高新神经技术的开发和经验验证速度，同时开发高技能的劳动力;评估这些技术对生活质量的影响;以及整合跨学科的知识，如人文学科，与神经技术，以了解集体智慧，并增强身体和认知能力。该中心的使命是多重的：通过向最终用户转让神经技术，加速科学进步，促进国民健康，并促进在科学，技术，工程和数学（STEM）通过扩大新的参与和保留现有的参与者。BRAIN将解决不成比例地影响代表性不足的群体的神经系统问题。BRAIN将通过创建从发现到解决方案的管道，同时帮助学生，科学家和工程师解决我们这个时代最大的未满足的医疗和医疗保健需求之一，成为神经技术中心。马里兰州巴尔的摩县大学（UMBC）网站，BRAIN中心的合作伙伴网站补充了现有的优势，并将研究扩展到新的领域，如网络人类系统/以人为中心的计算，人工智能，神经信号处理，神经成像和刺激，虚拟/增强/混合现实。因此，UMBC有具体的技术（引入新的研究领域），合作（与现有的BRAIN网站的组合项目）和资源（涉及东北生物医学产业和顶级国家和国际医疗中心，并靠近联邦机构和研究所，如NSF，NIH，NIDA，FDA和NASA）的贡献。该中心将在该项目完成后的10年内维护一个由产品和服务组成的项目库（https：//nsfbrain.org/）。该奖项反映了NSF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。

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.