Document Type
Article
Language
eng
Publication Date
2017
Publisher
BioMed Central
Source Publication
Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation
Source ISSN
1743-0003
Abstract
Over 50 million United States citizens (1 in 6 people in the US) have a developmental, acquired, or degenerative disability. The average US citizen can expect to live 20% of his or her life with a disability. Rehabilitation technologies play a major role in improving the quality of life for people with a disability, yet widespread and highly challenging needs remain. Within the US, a major effort aimed at the creation and evaluation of rehabilitation technology has been the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Centers (RERCs) sponsored by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research. As envisioned at their conception by a panel of the National Academy of Science in 1970, these centers were intended to take a “total approach to rehabilitation”, combining medicine, engineering, and related science, to improve the quality of life of individuals with a disability. Here, we review the scope, achievements, and ongoing projects of an unbiased sample of 19 currently active or recently terminated RERCs. Specifically, for each center, we briefly explain the needs it targets, summarize key historical advances, identify emerging innovations, and consider future directions. Our assessment from this review is that the RERC program indeed involves a multidisciplinary approach, with 36 professional fields involved, although 70% of research and development staff are in engineering fields, 23% in clinical fields, and only 7% in basic science fields; significantly, 11% of the professional staff have a disability related to their research. We observe that the RERC program has substantially diversified the scope of its work since the 1970’s, addressing more types of disabilities using more technologies, and, in particular, often now focusing on information technologies. RERC work also now often views users as integrated into an interdependent society through technologies that both people with and without disabilities co-use (such as the internet, wireless communication, and architecture). In addition, RERC research has evolved to view users as able at improving outcomes through learning, exercise, and plasticity (rather than being static), which can be optimally timed. We provide examples of rehabilitation technology innovation produced by the RERCs that illustrate this increasingly diversifying scope and evolving perspective. We conclude by discussing growth opportunities and possible future directions of the RERC program.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Reinkensmeyer, David J.; Blackstone, Sarah; Bodine, Cathy; Brabyn, John; Brienza, David; Caves, Kevin; DeRuyter, Frank; Durfee, Edmund; Fatone, Stefania; Fernie, Geoff; Gard, Steven; Karg, Patricia; Kuiken, Todd A.; Harris, Gerald F.; Jones, Mike; Li, Yue; Maisel, Jordana; McCue, Michael; Meade, Michelle A.; Mitchell, Helena; Mitzner, Tracy L.; Patton, James L.; Requejo, Philip S.; Rimmer, James H.; Rogers, Wendy A.; Rymer, W. Zev; Sanford, Jon A.; Schneider, Lawrence; Sliker, Levin; Sprigle, Stephen; Steinfeld, Aaron; Steinfeld, Edward; Vanderheiden, Gregg; Winstein, Carolee; Zhang, Li-Qun; and Corfman, Thomas, "How a Diverse Research Ecosystem Has Generated New Rehabilitation Technologies: Review of NIDILRR’s Rehabilitation Engineering Research Centers" (2017). Biomedical Engineering Faculty Research and Publications. 529.
https://epublications.marquette.edu/bioengin_fac/529
Comments
Published version. Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation, Vol. 14, No. 109 (2017): 1-53. DOI. © The Author(s). 2017 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.