IEEE P2794

New IEEE Standard - Active - Draft.
The pace of research and development 1 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 neurotechnology standards limits the transparency, reproducibility, and meta-analysis of this growing body of literature, 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 the full range of neuroscience and neurotechnology stakeholders. This trial-use standard summarizes the recommendations of IEEE P2794 Standards Working Group.

This standard defines minimum reporting requirements and best practices for scientific reporting of in vivo neural interface research studies, including both animal studies and human subjects research. While a primary use case for this standard is scientific and clinical publications, this standard also applies to other forms of scientific reporting, such as those included in regulatory, funding, or reimbursement-related applications and project documentation.
The primary purpose of this standard is to improve the interpretability, reproducibility, and meta-analysis of scientific reporting (including peer-reviewed publications, scientific manuscripts, and confidential study reports for regulatory or funding purposes) of vivo research studies (including both human and animal research) involving neural interfacing technologies (including both stimulation and recording from the central and peripheral nervous system) across different projects and institutions. Secondarily, this standard aims to facilitate the further development and standardization of neurodata file formats, by defining the essential features, characteristics, and data from neural interface studies that constitute an adequately complete description of the experimental methodology and results to achieve study replicability and reproducibility.