In recent years hundreds of successful community-driven open source software projects have incarnated. However, it is quite hard to find similar success stories in the field of neuropsychological rehabilitation, which means rehabilitation related to aphasia and disorders of attention, for example. The NeurOSS project aims at building a Java based open source software platform for developing tools for neuropsychological rehabilitation and forming a community of people from all over the world that would contribute to shared collection of open source plug-in components extending the core services of the platform. The idea of Open Source Software is tempting especially in the health care sector. A large amount of research results are available and waiting to be implemented for the real-world usage. Most of the research is universal, which means that the results are equally valid everywhere. Developing countries' health care systems have very limited resources for purchasing software products from abroad. Despite of that, many of those countries have succeeded in creating a working education system that trains highly skilled professionals. They could easily localize and adapt free open source products to local needs—if only there were such software products available! The main key for success is community. If the developer community created enough open source components for different rehabilitation related tasks, it would be possible to reach the critical amount of usefulness, which draws other projects to utilize the NeurOSS platform, as well. The first presentation of the NeurOSS platform happened during ICCHP 2006 Conference on July 2006 at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria (download PDF). Current development efforts are mainly focused on more specialized 'serious gaming' application for dyslectic children but also the NeurOSS platform development is going on little by little.

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