Collaborative Machines Enhancing Therapies (COMET)

Our proposed Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center targets the NIDILRR priority of Strategies, Techniques, and Intervention. Our target population is the large group of individuals with physical impairments due to stroke and spinal cord injury. Our group has had a strong history of engineering and science on therapy technology using robots, sensors, virtual reality and computational analysis. What is needed now is to not only further understanding and optimization of efficacy of these technologies, but also understanding uptake of these innovations in real-life applications. We believe that the critical pathway is to embody several meanings of the word “collaboration” throughout. Constituent projects will develop and test their individual technology for the first three years, and the final 2 years will be a pragmatic trial of all elements in collaboration, including successful developments of the past. This approach allows disease severity to be studied across its fullest range, we can inspect both the inpatient and outpatient rehabilitation settings, and multiple technologies can be studied simultaneously. Through six projects and three support cores, our long-term goals are to [1] gain knowledge about therapy techniques and interventions, [2] influence and understand how to change the standard of care, [3] educate and share our new knowledge, and [4] functionally reintegrate individuals back into society. This multi-institutional collaboration involves partnerships at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of California Irvine, Northwestern University, The University of Alabama at Birmingham, North Carolina State University, Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands, Harvard University, and several other commercial, clinical, and consumer stakeholders. However, the pragmatic clinical trial of years 3-4 will be conducted at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, as the test site for implementing a study of real-life translation of bot