Abstract
The pace of research and development in neuroscience, neurotechnology, and neurorehabilitation is rapidly accelerating, with the number of publications doubling every 4.2 years. Maintaining this progress requires technological standards and scientific reporting guidelines to provide frameworks for communication and interoperability. The present lack of such standards for neurotechnologies limits the transparency, reproducibility, and meta-analysis of this growing body of research, posing an ongoing barrier to research, clinical, and commercial objectives.
Continued neurotechnological innovation requires the development of some minimal standards to promote integration between this broad spectrum of technologies and therapies. To preserve design freedom and accelerate the translation of research into safe and effective technologies with maximal user benefit, such standards must be collaboratively co-developed by a full spectrum of neuroscience and neurotechnology stakeholders. This paper summarizes the preliminary recommendations of IEEE Working Group P2794, developing a Reporting Standard for in-vivo Neural Interface Research (RSNIR).
Impact Statement This work provides a preliminary set of reporting guidelines for implantable neural interface research, developed by IEEE WG P2794 in open collaboration between a range of stakeholders to accelerate the research, development, and integration of innovative neurotechnologies.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication and is currently under review. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible. This work was supported by the IEEE Technical Advisory Board Committee on Standards (TAB-CoS) Standards association discretionary fund, as well as the Stimulating Peripheral Activity to Relieve Conditions (SPARC) Program, U.S. National Institutes of Health under OT2OD023872.
All authors are current members of IEEE WG P2794, for which Z. McKinney serves as Chair and C.D. Eiber as Vice Chair. In addition, C.D. Eiber and S. John are with the University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia. J. Delbeke is with Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium. J. Cardoso is with Instituto de Medicina Molecular, Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal. M. de Neeling is with KU Leuven. C.W. Lee is employed by Hyundai MOBIS, Seoul, South Korea. Jerry Skefos is employed by MetaCell, Boston, MA, USA. A. Sun is with the University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, USA. D. Prodanov is with NeuroElectronics Research Flanders, Leuven, Belgium. Z. McKinney is with the BioRobotics Institute and Center for Excellence in Robotics and AI, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa Italy (correspondence e-mail: z.mckinney{at}ieee.org).
