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Forum on International Collaborative Research in Rehabilitation
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(CASE STUDIES: SUCCESSFUL INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATIONS IN REHABILITATION RESEARCH)
Mounir Mokhtari, Ph.D., Associate
Professor
Disability Engineering & Communication Lab, Institut
National des
Télécommunications, Evry, France
Machiel Van der Loos, Ph.D., Biomedical
Engineer
Rehabilitation R & D Center, VA Palo Alto Health
Care System, Palo Alto,
California, U.S.A.
Abstract
Severe physical disability keeps many of the worlds citizens from enjoying full, independent, productive, high-quality life styles. Information, communication, and mechatronic technologies are considered by the rehabilitation research community as new opportunities to increase the well-being of people with disabilities and consequently provide a more equal place in our society. For effective delivery of these technologies, researchers must be able to integrate different professional fields in medicine, engineering, evaluation, and management disciplines. The distributed availability of competencies and infrastructures around the world impel us to harness these diverse capabilities through a network of excellence involving key researchers in Europe and USA. This presentation will describe a proposal we are submitting in Fall 2003 in response to the EU 6th Framework Call for Proposals in the Network of Excellence category. Separate funding for the U.S. based work will be sought from federal U.S. sources such as the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and National Science Foundation (NSF).