Researchers Working on a Brain Prosthesis

Remember the story I read a few years back about a man who is stabbed in the head and suffers massive brain damage?  The flip on that story was there was a prosthesis that by passed and augmented the damage to his brain and allowed him to think and function.  

Well that was good science fiction, but Philadelphia researchers are working on a project that may help restore memory to brain damaged patients.  

Up to this point devices could only activate one or two electrodes.  What the the research groups are working towards is a controller that will activate hundreds of electrodes!  Plus how the electrodes fire is controlled by the patient's brain.

There are teams not only working on memory loss but also on Parkinson's.  One team is working with a device manufacturer to develop a unit, within the next 3 years, capable of targeting 256 sites in the brain.   The ultimate goal is a permanent and implantable device. 

Read the rest of the Newsworks article HERE

New Brain Implant Tech for Detecting & Treating Seizures - Terminal Man anyone?

Science Daily blog has an interesting article concerning new technology that "detect(s) a number of neurological symptoms, such as .... epileptic seizure(s), and treating them simultaneously. Now I know this is not exactly ground breaking because some form of this tech has been talked about since the 90s at the very least and very similar tech is used for and in the case of extreme heart disease to shock a fibrillating heart back to sinusoidal rhythm and there has been discussion of a form of EST in severe depression. This tech is aiming at a different procedure by "loading specific drugs onto an array of electrodes and triggering their release into ... neurons"

What really differentiates this technology from past ones, other than using chemicals instead of electro-shock, comes from the article also.

• On top of this, the researchers have also demonstrated how the release of drugs could be informed, in real-time, by the recording of activity in neurons, a step essential for creating a closed-loop system that both diagnoses and treats symptoms simultaneously

Its a fascinating idea but it did call to mind Crichton's Terminal Man. You can read the complete Science Daily article here