1. Background
The use of engineering tools, design, research, and thinking to create environments and capabilities whereby individuals who are currently under-employed or unemployed due to a physical disability (e.g., amputation or spinal cord injury) or neurological difference (e.g., autism) are enabled to become fully productive and employed members of society has been the implicit goal of decades of research at Vanderbilt University and elsewhere. At Vanderbilt University, progress in these areas has been greatly facilitated by the proximity of the School of Engineering to the world-class Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the resulting close collaboration between engineering and medical researchers. However, these approaches have typically been siloed into cate-gories such as rehabilitation engineering (which focuses on the amelioration of physical injuries). We propose that these and similar activities—aimed at empowering individuals with physical challenges and neurological differences to contribute their abilities to the workforce specifically and to society more broadly—consti-tute a new subfield of engineering that we call Engineering for Inclusion, or more succinctly, Inclusion Engineering.