Kickstarting Advances in Assistive and Rehabilitative Technologies

Overview: A virtual workshop on the topic of assistive and rehabilitative technologies for persons with disabilities or impairments will be conducted The main objective of the workshop is to understand the existing landscape of research, development, and practice for these technologies and how they promote better and healthier living for persons with disabilities or impairments. Building on participant insights and expertise, the challenges and opportunities for convergence based research that’s inspired by users will be identified by workshop participants.

They will engage with each other to answer several relevant questions regarding this landscape and to develop a framework for identifying investigations and initiatives ready for convergent acceleration. Inspired by grounded theory studies, the synthesized knowledge and identified categories will be fed back to the participants for further exploration and refinement.

Intellectual Merit: The workshop aims to identify candidate research and translational gaps related to assistive and rehabilitative technologies. This will be made possible by bringing together a diverse group of stakeholders from academia, industry, other agencies, nonprofits and the users themselves. To provide a coherent structure to the workshop , the overall research area has been decomposed into the intervention type, the various populations with disabilities or impairments, and the enablers of the technological interventions.

Participants and perspectives from across these classes will be invited. In bringing together professionals and people who would not normally comingle, the intent is to compare and contrast the different perspective to arrive at a holistic understanding of the field and answer the questions: What initiatives or innovations would most effectively address the most impactful needs of the various target populations.?

Are these initiatives capable of resulting in a proof-of-concept deliverable within a 3-4-year period? These answers should identify some clear themes that need convergence and are ready for an accelerated delivery of some tangible outcomes.

Broader Impacts: Beside the potential to seed new research collaborations, the work will connect researchers, practitioners, nonprofits and industry in some very unique partnerships. Secondly, the topic of investigation is one that touches on most members of society given the prevalence of disabilities or injury-related impairments within the population.

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.