“Intelligent” Neural Interfaces: System Design Strategies from Engineering Bench To Patient Bedside

Date/Time
Date(s) - 03/22/2010
5:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Dr. Justin Sanchez, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering

Closed-loop neural interfaces have the great potential for treating neurological disorders and restoring communication/control in disabled individuals. The transformative aspect of closed-loop neural interfaces is that they can be designed as “intelligent tools” that have the capability to assist, evolve, and grow with the user. Unlike many other devices, neural interfaces exist in a shared space that seamlessly spans the user’s internal, adaptive representation of the world and the physical environment enabling a much deeper human-device symbiosis. Recent advancements in the neuroscience and engineering of neural interfaces are providing a blueprint for neurophysiologic hardware design and methods for determining representation in multiscale signals for deriving therapeutic strategies. This talk covers recent advances in engineering and technology supporting the development of intelligent neural interfaces from the bench to bedside and contrasts them with “lessons learned” from the past 20 years of neural interface design.