Abstract
The International Functional Electrical Stimulation Society (IFESS, http://www.ifess.org/) is an inter-professional and collaborative organization, whose main objective is promotion of research, applications and understanding of electrical stimulation as it is utilized in the field of medicine. One of the ways IFESS contributes to the field of electrical stimulation is by organizing annual conferences that are located in different continents. The IFESS community is composed of Academic Researchers, Medical Doctors, Physiotherapists, Occupational Therapists and Engineers. This year IFESS has had the privilege to have the conference organized by Dr. Christine Azevedo Coste from Inria (France). In her efforts Dr. Azevedo Coste was supported by CAMIN, an Inria team hosted by the Informatics, Robotics and Microelectronics Laboratory (LIRMM, Montpellier) and Prof. Milos R. Popovic from the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute and University of Toronto (Canada) as program co-chair. The organization committee also included the board of directors of IFESS, which is directed by Dr. Thierry Keller (Tecnalia, Spain). This year's conference took place in La Grande-Motte, France from June 8 to 10. The topic of this IFESS conference was " Hybrid Approaches to Functional Electrical Stimulation ". Since this is the 20 th anniversary of the IFESS Conferences, we wanted to make the conference articles available to a broader audience. Prof. Winfried Mayr, who is a foundation member of IFESS, from the Medical University Vienna, Center for Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, suggested that we approach the European Journal of Translational Myology (EJTM) to collaborate on this project. EJTM and its Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Ugo Carraro from Fondazione Ospedale San Camillo, Venice, and University of Padova, Italy, very kindly offered to our team to publish the conference articles in EJTM. EJTM, former Basic and Applied Myology (BAM), has a long tradition in integrating physiological, clinical and engineering aspects of muscle related multidisciplinary research. It has been pioneering open access strategies long before others discovered this new barrier-free quality of sharing knowledge within the scientific community, and further with application professionals and interested public. We are very grateful to Prof. Carraro and EJTM for giving us this opportunity, and we hope that this issue of EJTM will inspire new generations of scientists and clinicians to join the very exciting and rewarding field of Functional Electrical Stimulation. In this special edition of EJTM we are proud to present the latest studies and projects that are being conducted by the scientists, practitioners and trainees in the broader IFESS community. In this special issue you will find articles about brain machine interfaces and how they can be used to control functional electrical stimulation devices, electrical stimulation for regeneration and reinnervation following peripheral nerve injury, sequential electrical stimulation, electrical stimulation based cueing in Parkinson's disease patients, and implantable gastrointestinal stimulators for obese patients to name a few.