This medical rehabilitation research resource infrastructure core, Translation of Rehabilitation Engineering Advancement and Technology (TREAT), provides a national resource for medical rehabilitation researchers, clinicians, bioengineers and medical rehabilitation and assistive technology inventors, including people with disabilities, for translation and commercialization of rehabilitation applications. The expertise of the core team and core partner organizations are leveraged to provide education and hands-on collaboration in early stage product evaluation, technology assessment, prototype development, commercialization planning and execution, and to develop and foster comparative effectiveness clinical trials within the rehabilitation research community, extending to the greate community beyond the clinic. The goals are to: 1) rapidly expand the knowledge base and education of medical rehabilitation researchers related to rehabilitation and assistive technology evaluation and commercialization, and 2) provide infrastructure and access to core services for evaluation and translation of novel ideas for rehabilitation and assistive technologies across the United States
Technology transfer and appropriate clinical comparative effectiveness trials of rehabilitation research and technology are significantly lacking. NIH is particularly interested in extending its rehabilitation research infrastructure networks to include outcomes research, in order to better support the translation of basic and clinical findings into real -world settings. While there are several centers around the country that focus on career development of rehabilitation researchers, TREAT is the only targeted effort at developing expertise in the practice of technology transfer to clinical use that can be disseminated more broadly to the rehabilitation research community.
| Eftekhar, Amir; Norton, James J S; McDonough, Christine M et al. (2018) Retraining Reflexes: Clinical Translation of Spinal Reflex Operant Conditioning. Neurotherapeutics : |
