Why deep tech and healthcare combination spells hope

Watching a near and dear one struggle with Parkinson’s disease and slowly slip into dementia as it advances is not easy; you lose a bit of yourself as the patient moves to the mid-late and advanced stage soon requiring wheelchair support and often experiencing hallucinations or delusions. However, advances in digital technologies and the capacity of machine-to-machine communication at around 10 gigabits per second (Gbps) have brought in some hope.

While multichannel electrophysiological sensors and stimulators, specifically those used to study the nervous system, are usually based on monolithic microelectrode arrays, the architecture of such arrays limits flexibility in electrode placement and scaling to a large number of nodes, especially across non-contiguous locations. However, researchers at Brown University recently published a paper in the journal ‘Nature Electronics’, indicating the possibility of wirelessly networked and powered electronic microchips that can autonomously perform neural sensing and electrical micro-stimulation.

The microchips, termed neurograins, have a ~1 GHz electromagnetic transcutaneous link to an external telecom hub, providing bidirectional communication and control at the individual device level. In simple terms, the microchip that is roughly the size of a salt grain can be scattered over the brain’s surface — or even within its tissue — in order to collect neural data. And even though the concept is still at a very early stage with the team implementing neurograins in rats so far, they are hopeful of replicating the success in humans too. According to Brown University neuroengineer and lead author of the study Arto Nurmikko, if they can improve the output quality of the system spread over 770 neurograins per brain using customised TDMA protocol, there is a possibility to stimulate neurons with electric pulses and treat serious neurological disorders like Parkinson’s, paralysis and epilepsy.

It is interesting to note that despite the sparseness of the cortical connection matrix, the potential bandwidth of all of the neurons in the human cortex is around a terabit per second – assuming a maximum rate of 100 bits/s over each axon in the white matter. However, this capacity is never achieved in practice because only a fraction of cortical neurons has a high rate of firing at any given time. Nevertheless, the research gives us more than a ray of hope that deep tech combined with advanced health tech, along with a very high-caliber info-processor, will one day be able to decode and translate brain signals into commands that can be relayed to external devices for desired actions.

The article has been written by Shubhendu Parth