Controlling animal movements with your thoughts alone. Monitoring a pupil’s attention in class with a headset that scans brain activity. And, of course, the much more familiar cochlear implants that help the deaf hear or deep-brain stimulators that assist people with Parkinson’s disease to regain functional mobility.
This is neurotech—new, potentially revolutionary technology that promises to transform our lives. With all the global challenges of today, we need revolutionary technology to help the world cope.
Neurotech is our, frankly, mind-blowing attempt to connect human brains to machines, computers and mobile phones. Although brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are the heart of neurotech, it is more broadly defined as technology able to collect, interpret, infer or modify information generated by any part of the nervous system. Why? To develop therapies for mental illnesses and neurological diseases. Beyond health care, it could soon be used in education, gaming, entertainment, transportation and so much more.
But there are pitfalls: there are no widely accepted regulations or guardrails yet when it comes to neurotech’s development or deployment. We need them—we need them bad. We must have principles and policies around neurotech, technology safeguards, and national and international regulations.
WHAT IS NEUROTECH, ANYWAY?
There are different types of it—some is invasive, some isn’t. Invasive brain-computer interfaces involve placing microelectrodes or other kinds of neurotech materials directly onto the brain or even embedding them into the neural tissue. The idea is to directly sense or modulate neural activity.
Such technology has already improved the quality of life and abilities of people with different illnesses or impairments, from epilepsy to Parkinson’s Disease to chronic pain. One day, we might implant such neurotech devices into paralyzed humans, allowing them to easily control phones, computers and prosthetic limbs—with their thoughts alone. In 2017, Rodrigo Hübner Mendes, a paraplegic, used neurotech to drive a racecar with his mind. Recently, an invasive neurotech device accurately decoded imagined handwriting movements in real time, at a speed that matched typical typing. Researchers have also showed how invasive neurotech allows users with missing or damaged limbs to feel touch, heat and cold through their prostheses.
There is also noninvasive neurotech that can be used for similar applications. For example, researchers have developed wearables to infer a person’s intended speech or movement. Such technology could eventually enable a patient with language or movement difficulties—say, someone with locked-in syndrome—to communicate easier and more effectively.
