Problems

What Problems is Neurotech Trying to Solve?

The goal of using neurotechnology within the medical field includes its applications with the diagnosis and treatment of particular brain disorders and mental illnesses. Additionally, neurotechnology’s applications goes beyond the scope of the healthcare field into the court of law, such as with cognitive enhancement techniques such as the ones described in the article Human enhancement for the common good: using neurotechnologies to improve eyewitness memory. This article discusses how neurotechnologies can be used to improve eyewitness memory so they can provide more reliable and trustworthy evidence in court cases. Moving beyond the court case usage, while using Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS), Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), or psychopharmaceutical drugs have their benefits there are, as always, ethical issues regarding the use of these neurotechnologies. These include concerns about safety, privacy, personality, and selfishness. Despite these concerns, most are in favor of using neurotechnology for the common good. Besides DBS, TMS, and psychopharmaceuticals, there are other invasive and noninvasive neurotechnologies that are being considered, such as EEG, fNIRS, fMRI, MEG, ECoG, microelectrodes, tES, FUS, and ECT. The application for these technologies vary to include communication, cognitive enhancement, memory enhancement, attention monitoring and enhancement, situation awareness, social interactions, hyperscanning, personnel training, and complex problem solving. Other articles focus on particular neurotechnologies such as with the company humm, which uses tACS, a specific form of tES to improve problems related to cognitive abilities and focus. From another article, rTMS can be used to enhance rTMS over the left prefrontal cortex, which is involved in pattern recognition. There are discussions about the technical requirements and engineering challenges of neurotech, particularly focusing on the safety of patients and how to translate a biological process to an easily accessible and interpretable machine. Additionally, designing robust and reliable technologies to study the brain and affect it is also important. Designing neurotechnologies that can look at the system as a whole instead of specific parts of the brain are becoming increasingly relevant as people are looking to study the brain more holistically, helping to fill in the gaps of information present today.