IT WAS A TREMENDOUS HONOR to be selected as a recipient of the Mitchell Rosenthal Memorial Lecture Award and to present this address, together with corecipient James Malec, at the 2012 meetings of the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine. Dr Malec and I decided to focus our presentations on new trends and developments in the field; hence, the title of the presentation—"Reconceptualizing Brain Injury Rehabilitation in the Future: A Peek Over the Horizon." We tried to apply past and emerging trends and consider new domains of emerging knowledge to envision how rehabilitation practices might evolve and identify those factors that might influence them. While a great many new trends in the field could be discussed, I will focus my remarks on the role of technology in brain injury research and rehabilitation. Technology has driven huge societal change—in how we communicate, acquire and share information, and understand our world. Technology has led to new discoveries and tools in the realm of neuroscience and made possible exciting new developments in neuroprosthetics and assistive aids and devices. Rehabilitation specialists have recognized and capitalized on the power and potential of what is increasingly "everyday" technology, and the potential to build on these trends in the future is enormous. I believe that technology, while often associated with a sense of the mechanistic, can result in more individualized, personalized, and environmentally imbedded interventions.
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