Neurotech Leaders Forum today

The first day of the 6th Annu­al Neu­rotech Lead­ers Forum took place today. Good group, with con­tent focused on

a) the basic sci­en­tif­ic under­pin­nings of the neu­rotech­nol­o­gy sec­tor, deliv­ered by War­ren Grill, Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor of Bio­Med­ical Engi­neer­ing at Duke Uni­ver­si­ty, and

b) mar­ket seg­men­ta­tion and trends, by Neu­rotech Reports’ founder James Cavuoto.

James defines the neu­rotech­nol­o­gy mar­ket as “the appli­ca­tion of elec­tron­ics and engi­neer­ing to the ner­vous sys­tem”, and cat­e­go­rizes it into 4 seg­ments: neu­ro­mod­u­la­tion, neu­rore­ha­bil­i­ta­tion, neu­rosens­ing and neur­al prostheses.

How is this rel­e­vant to the Brain Fit­ness Revolution?

For one, both fields share a com­mon prob­lem today: the need for larg­er pub­lic and clin­i­cian edu­ca­tion, so that there is more under­stand­ing on recent research find­ings and their impli­ca­tions for our lives and health care.

More impor­tant­ly, James did a good job at defin­ing Brain Fit­ness Pro­grams as “nat­ur­al stim­u­la­tion”, mean­ing that the inter­ven­tion to train/ improve one’s neur­al cir­cuits does not require an inva­sive treat­ment. Fit­ness is not about pro­ce­dures such as deep brain stim­u­la­tion. Yet, he added, com­pa­nies such as Posit Sci­ence have designed their prod­ucts in a way that stim­u­late the pre­cise parts of the brain that need that stim­u­la­tion and re-wiring.

Sharp­Brains is pre­sent­ing tomorrow.