Implantable Brain Computer Interface Collaborative Community

The Foundation is supporting the establishment of the Implantable Brain Computer Interface Collaborative Community (iBCI-CC). A Collaborative Community is an FDA-recognized continuing forum convened independently by private and public sector stakeholders to tackle medical device challenges with broad impacts, producing deliverables as needed to achieve common objectives. Currently, no neuroscience-related Collaborative Communities exist. The iBCI-CC aims to foster cross-sector collaboration among a comprehensive set of BCI stakeholders, including people experiencing neurological injury or disease, researchers, clinicians, medical device companies, patient advocacy groups, ethicists, regulators, payers, federal agencies, and research support organizations. This grant will support the launch of the iBCI-CC, beginning with formally recruiting the founding community members and obtaining FDA recognition as an official Collaborative Community. Finally, this grant will support a meeting to collaboratively identify specific challenges of priority importance to the participants, which may relate to regulation, public messaging, ethical issues, or BCI end-user preferences, and to establish diverse working groups around each topic to begin addressing these challenges.