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Over the past two decades Biomedical Engineering has emerged as a major discipline that bridges societal needs of human health care with the development of novel technologies. Every medical institution is now equipped at varying degrees of sophistication with the ability to monitor human health in both non-invasive and invasive modes. The multiple scales at which human physiology can be interrogated provide a profound perspective on health and disease. We are at the nexus of creating “avatars” (herein defined as an extension of “digital twins”) of human patho/physiology to serve as paradigms for interrogation and potential intervention. Motivated by the emergence of these new capabilities, the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, the Departments of Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University and Bioengineering at University of California at San Diego sponsored an interdisciplinary workshop to define the grand challenges that face biomedical engineering and the mechanisms to address these challenges. The Workshop identified five grand challenges with cross-cutting themes and provided a roadmap for new technologies, identified new training needs, and defined the types of interdisciplinary teams needed for addressing these challenges. The themes presented in this paper include: 1) accumedicine through creation of avatars of cells, tissues, organs and whole human; 2) development of smart and responsive devices for human function augmentation; 3) exocortical technologies to understand brain function and treat neuropathologies; 4) the development of approaches to harness the human immune system for health and wellness; and 5) new strategies to engineer genomes and cells. 

Over the past few decades, there have been many studies of human-human physical interaction to better understand why humans physically interact so effectively and how dyads outperform individuals in certain motor tasks. Because of the different methodologies and experimental setups in these studies, however, it is difficult to draw general conclusions as to the reasons for this improved performance. In this study, we propose an open-source experimental framework for the systematic study of the effect of human-human interaction, as mediated by robots, at the ankle joint. We also propose a new framework to study various interactive behaviors (i.e., collaborative, cooperative, and competitive tasks) that can be emulated using a virtual spring connecting human pairs. To validate the proposed experimental framework, we perform a transparency analysis, which is closely related to haptic rendering performance. We compare muscle EMG and ankle motion data while subjects are barefoot, attached to the unpowered robot, and attached to the powered robot implementing transparency control. We also validate the performance in rendering a virtual springs covering a range of stiffness values (5-50 Nm/rad) while the subjects track several desired trajectories(sine waves at frequencies between 0.1 and 1.1 Hz). Finally, we study the performance of the system in human-human interaction under nine different interactive conditions. Finally, we demonstrate the feasibility of the system in studying human-human interaction under different interactive behaviors.