Background

Ventilator users face significant challenges in areas of quality of life and basic survival. Dr. Pamela Block and Dr. Brooke Ellison started the VENTure Think-Tank in the fall of 2012 to address these challenges through technology and policy solutions. They invited local vent-users and their families to join them and also a group of professors, researchers, scientists, therapists, and students throughout Stony Brook University, and community partners in areas of health, computing and engineering technology and disability rights.

The extensive and diverse expertise that members of Stony Brook University's VENTure Think Tank embody provides the framework for support, information, advice, and resources for this research project. Members of VENTure Think Tank will be instrumental in providing information for articles and reports, and the structure of the think tank will be a formal mechanism by which information can be shared among experts. Similarly, VENTure meetings will be a fixed outlet through which information can be disseminated and elicited from ventilator users, themselves.