Meeting of the IEEE Industry Connection Group on Neuro-Technologies for Brain-Machine Interfacing Special Session on BMI-related Standards SMC 2017 BMI Workshop

Meeting of the IEEE Industry Connection Group on Neuro-Technologies for Brain-Machine Interfacing Special Session on BMI-related Standards SMC 2017 BMI Workshop 150 150 Standards Community (SC)

Friday, October 6th, 2017, 13:00 – 17:00
Max Bell Building MB 252, Banff Center, Canada

Increased attention to Neuro-Technologies has triggered great expectations on the benefit they can bring both in consumer applications. Research on brain-machine interfaces starts to leave the laboratory and efforts are put on transitioning to the development of both consumer and clinical products. This transition entails multiple challenges since it requires researchers, manufacturers, and regulatory agencies to ensure these devices comply with well-defined criteria on their safety and effectiveness.

The IEEE Industry Connections Activity on Neuro Technologies for Brain-Machine Interfacing was established in May 2017 to evaluate the current state of standards in this field, identify existing gaps and promote active participation of all stakeholders. It currently gathers more than 30 people from academy, industry and regulatory agencies who are preparing a Standards Vision Paper on these technologies. As part of its activities,this session will provide a space for discussing how standardization of neurotechnologies is needed to successfully translate the current developments into systems that can really benefit their intended users.

Topics to be discussed include:

  • What are the biggest challenges in the standardization of neurotechnologies?
  • Should there be a separate set of standards for clinical and non-clinical applications? Can standards help to leverage the dynamism of consumer application development to accelerate the clinical translation?
  • As neurotechnologies tend to involve multiple components (exoskeletons, AR/VR headsets, neural interfaces).
  • How to ensure reliable, safe interoperability in complex, heterogeneous systems.

This session is part of the SMC 2017 BMI Workshop and will be composed of short presentations and panels with different stakeholders from the private, academic, and regulatory sectors. Ample time has been reserved for discussions with contributions from the attendants, including breakout discussion sessions on standards gaps for clinical and nonclinical BMI applications.

The outcome of this session will be used to prepare a vision paper on standards for neurotechnologies and recommendations on future actions (expected release date: Spring 2018).

Contacts:
Ricardo Chavarriaga, Bill Ash, Carole Carey

Note: Attendants should be attentive that there will be different sitting times for lunch. Given the timing of the session, attendants should have lunch during the 11:30-12:25 sitting.