The federal government has recognized the need for a better understanding of rehabilitation science and engineering. Key agencies that funds such research include NIH (especially the National Center of Medical Rehabilitation Research (NCMRR), the U.S. Department of Education's National Institute of Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR), the Veterans Affairs (VA) R&D, and the National Science Foundation's Biomedical Engineering and Research to Aid the Disabled program (see also rehab links).

On several occasions collections of experts have convened to help establish priorities for the emerging field of rehabilitation science and engienering. The reports are long, but here are a few exerpts from summary statements:

From the Executive Summary of the NIH-sponsored Report of the Task Force on Medical Rehabilitation Research (a 1991 report that helped frame the research priorities of the then-new NCMRR):

"... the Task Force concluded that three overriding needs are critically important to the field's progress:

• Develop meaningful quantitative measures of impairments, disabilities, and handicaps, and of the outcome of rehabilitation interventions. ...

• Develop standards and guidelines for the design and application of evaluative tools.

• Evaluate the effectiveness of existing and emerging rehabilitation procedures."

From an engineering perspective these come back to the two classic areas: assessment (first two bullets) and therapy (last bullet).  These will re-emerge throughout this class, and remain a scientific and engineering challenge.

In the late 1990's there was another group of experts in this area, with the outcomes of their work disseminated as the Institute of Medicine's seminal consensus book entitled Enabling America - Rehabilitation Science and Engineering. A key recommendation was the need for a multidisciplinary understanding of the enabling-disabling process.  This conceptual foundation focuses, appropriately, on the person, while still encompassing the range of science, from basic work on signaling mechanisms at the cellular level to the relation between psychological/spiritual status and healing mechanisms.

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