Open and Abundant Data is the Future of Rehabilitation and Research

Development of our current research practices has been driven by a number of assumptions and from operating within practical constraints. Technological change is beginning to remove many of these limits, although our research and practice has so far only gradually and partially evolved in response. The U.S. federal government is now mandating open data repositories for research that it funds. Policy changes regarding open data repositories and an increasing abundance of data arising from both research and practice provide the opportunity to revisit some assumptions. With abundant sources of data that may increasingly be collected automatically during rehabilitation, it seems fundamentally flawed that the resolution of the primary quantitative analysis approaches widely understood in our field is so limited by the need to contain the risk of false positives. Identification of more sophisticated approaches to our data, which may well already exist in the statistical literature, is a high priority.