By
Medical Care Review | Friday,
November 24,
2023
NeuroTech is a new industry at the intersection of neuroscience and technology. It brings new applications, processes, products, services, or business models that aim to provide scalable solutions that help people with neurological diseases, healthcare professionals, researchers, and payers.
FREMONT, CA: In the last few years, neurotechnology has moved faster, and now neuro researchers need to keep up with the latest trends. Choosing the right technology when setting up a study can be a game-changer if neuro researchers want to make significant discoveries. Neurotechnology is improving at a fantastic rate, and sometimes it seems more like science fiction than real science. So, let's look into a crystal ball and try to guess what the most critical trends in neuroscience will be in 2022.
Brain Implants and Telepathy
Brain implants make it possible for the brain and electronic devices to talk to each other. Brain activity can be changed, recorded, or translated to control things like a computer cursor or a robotic prosthesis. This has a lot of medical uses, like stopping abnormal brain activity caused by neurological diseases like epilepsy and Parkinson's disease, treating depression, spotting the start of an epileptic seizure, or making new sensory pathways to help the blind. There is a growing hope that "telepathy" will become a real skill in the near future. People can now use their brains' electrical signals to interact with, change, or affect their surroundings.
The new field of brain-computer interface (BCI) technology may make it possible for people who can't speak or move their limbs to communicate again or use devices to help them walk and handle things. Some people with severe disabilities already use a BCI to communicate and control basic things in their everyday lives. With better signal-acquisition hardware, clear clinical validation, viable models for spreading the technology, and, probably most importantly, increased reliability, BCIs could become a significant new way for people with disabilities to communicate and control things, and maybe even for people in general.
Interoception
Interoception is the process by which the nervous system senses and makes sense of information about what's happening inside the body. There's more and more evidence that signals sent from our organs to the brain play a significant role in controlling our emotions and keeping us from getting anxious or depressed. Researchers who study interoception have found that people with mental health problems have trouble processing interoceptive signals in the dorsal mid-insula cluster of the cerebral cortex. Finding these common differences in the brain is a crucial step toward a whole new field of mental health treatment.
