Monitoring and stimulating brain activity to achieve desired brain state: Key Neurotech Patent #10

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brain state
– Illus­tra­tive image from U.S. Patent No. 6,488,617

Today we are shar­ing a 2002 patent describ­ing a sys­tem link­ing brain sig­nal detec­tion to brain stim­u­la­tion techniques.

U.S. Patent No. 6,488,617: Method and device for pro­duc­ing a desired brain state

  • Assignee(s): Uni­ver­sal Hedonics
  • Inventor(s): Bruce F. Katz
  • Tech­nol­o­gy Cat­e­go­ry: Hybrid
  • Issue Date: Decem­ber 3, 2002

SharpBrains’ Take:

The ‘617 patent describes a sys­tem link­ing brain sig­nal detec­tion to brain stim­u­la­tion tech­niques with the pur­pose of achiev­ing a desired brain state. Cit­ed exam­ples of desired brain states in the back­ground sec­tion of the patent include high neur­al activ­i­ty in the alpha fre­quen­cy band (8–13 Hz) that may be cor­re­lat­ed with a feel­ing of relax­ation or bal­anc­ing of asym­met­ri­cal activ­i­ty between the right and left pre­frontal cor­tex that has been cor­re­lat­ed with depres­sion. With only two illus­tra­tion sheets and four pages of writ­ten descrip­tion, the spec­i­fi­ca­tion may be con­sid­ered some­what lim­it­ed. Nev­er­the­less, the inde­pen­dent claims map well to the inven­tive con­cept of a closed loop detec­tion-stim­u­la­tion sys­tem. These inde­pen­dent claims, along with the mul­ti­ple recit­ed modes of brain state detec­tion (e.g., MEG, EEG, MRI, etc.) and a fair­ly ear­ly pri­or­i­ty date (dat­ing back to 2000) are amongst the fac­tors mak­ing the ‘617 patent a key non-inva­sive neu­rotech­nol­o­gy patent.

Abstract:

A method and device for the pro­duc­tion of a desired brain state in an indi­vid­ual con­tain means for mon­i­tor­ing and ana­lyz­ing the brain state while a set of one or more mag­nets pro­duce fields that alter this state. A com­pu­ta­tion­al sys­tem alters var­i­ous para­me­ters of the mag­net­ic fields in order to close the gap between the actu­al and desired brain state. This feed­back process oper­ates con­tin­u­ous­ly until the gap is min­i­mized and/or removed.

Illus­tra­tive Claim 22. A device for pro­duc­ing a desired brain state in an indi­vid­ual by mea­sur­ing and con­trol­ling a brain sig­nal comprising;

  • means for mea­sur­ing a brain sig­nal indi­cat­ing a brain state of an individual;
  • a com­pu­ta­tion­al sys­tem for com­par­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics of the mea­sured brain state to char­ac­ter­is­tics of a desired brain state to deter­mine the dif­fer­ence between the mea­sured brain state and the desired brain state; and
  • means for apply­ing a mag­net­ic field hav­ing para­me­ters to the brain of the indi­vid­ual to alter the brain state, the para­me­ters being mag­net posi­tion, field mag­ni­tude, pulse fre­quen­cy, and pulse train duration.

To learn more about mar­ket data, trends and lead­ing com­pa­nies in the dig­i­tal brain health space –dig­i­tal plat­forms for brain/ cog­ni­tive assess­ment, mon­i­tor­ing and enhance­ment– check out this mar­ket report. To learn more about our analy­sis of 10,000+ patent fil­ings, check out this IP & inno­va­tion neu­rotech report.