How a Diverse Research Ecosystem Has Generated New Rehabilitation Technologies: Review of NIDILRR’s Rehabilitation Engineering Research Centers

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

CORRELATIONS ASSOCIATED WITH PARTICLES PRODUCED AT SMALL ANGLES IN p p COLLISIONS AT THE CERN ISR

Data on correlations between momentum analysed protons, pions or K mesons, and charged particles produced in pp collisions at the CERN ISR are presented. The charged particles were detected in a approximately 4 pi scintillation counter hodoscope. The pseudo- rapidity distributions are well described by production within the limits of cylindrical phase space, with negative kaons and antiprotons yielding narrower distributions than protons, pions and positive kaons. The azimuthal distributions show symmetry around the t-channel axis in the rest frame of the recoiling mass M/sub X/ in pp to aX(a =detected proton, pion, positive kaon). (14 refs)

INELASTIC DIFFRACTIVE SCATTERING AT THE CERN ISR

The properties of the diffractive peak observed in the mass spectra of systems recoiling against observed high-momentum protons emerging from pp collisions at the CERN ISR have been investigated. The cross sections in this peak have been found to have a steep t dependence which flattens out as mod t mod increases. The high mass side of the peak varies approximately as 1/M/sup 2/ (where M is the missing mass of the recoiling system) and scales well in terms of the variable M /sup 2//s. The position of the maximum has been observed to move to lower values of M/sup 2//s as the kinematic boundary of this variable decreases with increasing s. The measured cross sections, integrated up to M/sup 2//s=0.05, rise by (15+or-5)% over the s range 549 to 1464 GeV/sup 2/. (24 refs)