ComEngmt-Otrch Core

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming society by enabling advances in computer vision, natural language processing, and several areas of biomedical research. Some modern AI models have become so powerful they have been dubbed “Foundation Models.” Unfortunately, rehabilitation researchers and people with conditions that limit mobility have yet to see much benefit from modern AI, and no foundation model exists for rehabilitation. Our Center for Foundational Artificial Intelligence for Rehabilitation (the FAIR Center) will establish a vital research program to enable rehabilitation scientists to apply state-of-the-art AI to diagnose, monitor, and improve the outcomes of rehabilitation. We have created a large-scale, high-quality dataset of movements and rehabilitation outcomes, the FAIR Dataset, and tools to automatically integrate data from many research studies, which is vital for the field and the research we propose. Through our Community Outreach and Engagement Component we will: 1. Increase awareness of the Center and its resources among thousands of researchers, people with lived experience, and health providers through webinars, conferences, and community events. 2. Accelerate the AI-enabled rehabilitation research of 150 individuals through multi-day, in-person workshops. 3. Host a nationwide conference focused on the use of AI in rehabilitation to collectively advance the field and seed partnerships between Medical Rehabilitation Research Centers, people with lived experience, researchers, and clinicians from diverse disciplines. 4. Develop diverse communication channels to effectively promote the Center’s resources. 5. Create and maintain vibrant consortia that engage researchers, health providers, and people with lived experience to maximize the impact of our resources in targeted rehabilitation areas. By providing high-quality software tools, data, and AI models, the FAIR Center will enable collaboration of unprecedented scale between bioengineers, clinicians, computer scientists, people with lived experience with mobility-limiting conditions, and others focused on rehabilitation. Our training efforts will create a new generation of rehabilitation scientists who are fluent in the strengths and challenges of AI. Our Center will be run by a tightly integrated clinical and engineering team, enabling us to appreciate the goals of people with lived experience, recruit participants to our studies, and rapidly create and share valuable new technology. Together with the FAIR Center community, we will achieve the potential of AI to understand and improve human movement, and increase ability for people with osteoarthritis, cerebral palsy, and many other conditions.