Age-related diseases, neurological disorders, such as stroke, spinal cord injury and traumatic brain injury can have debilitating effects on cognitive-motor function, significantly decreasing quality and length of life. There is a critical need for technologies to effectively address the care and rehabilitation. However, innovation in these neurotechnologies faces several challenges: slow rate of evaluation when compared to invention, lack of standards for safety, efficacy, and long-term reliability, longer time-to-market and lack of affordable technologies. To address these challenges, the Stevens Institute of Technology (SIT) site will partner with Arizona State University (ASU) and the University of Houston (UH) to join a multi-institution Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC) for Building Reliable Advances and Innovation in Neurotechnology (BRAIN).
BRAIN’s vision is a synergistic, interdisciplinary approach to develop and validate affordable patient-centered technologies. BRAIN will leverage expertise in neurotechnologies at SIT, UH and ASU to 1) enhance testing and validation of new technologies through industrial partnerships 2) develop standards for technologies using system-level approaches 3) characterize innovative technologies such as biosensors and quantitative analysis tools for systems and behaviors 4) evaluate the impact of these technologies on quality of life and 5) reduce the cost of neurotechnologies.
BRAIN’s mission is multifold: to accelerate the progress of science and advance national health by transferring engineering innovations in neurotechnology to the end users, and to rectify underrepresentation in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields by broadening new participation and retaining current participants in STEM. It also will focus on problems in the neurological space that affect underrepresented groups disproportionately. BRAIN will become an innovative neurotechnology hub, creating a pipeline from discoveries to solutions while helping talented students, scientists, and engineers in the region take their innovations to the next level and solve one of the greatest unmet medical and health care needs of our time.
BRAIN will leverage unique research and development ecosystems with industrial partnerships to design and validate neurotechnologies that can effectively transform the lives of individuals with disabilities. The SIT IUCRC site will contribute in five primary themes – cyber human systems, artificial intelligence, neurobionics, nerve repair and regeneration and neuromechanics. The site will bring in expertise in artificial intelligence, big data analytics, cloud computing, computational modeling, neural interfaces, biomechanics, wearable robots, virtual and augmented reality and other noninvasive solutions. The site's data management plan will ensure data integrity, data sharing, and data mining according to institutional and federal guidelines.
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.
