Carbon nanotube coated high-throughput neurointerfaces in assistive environments

摘要

Loosing motor activity due to impaired or damaged nerves or muscles affects millions of people world-wide. The resulting lack of mobility and/or impaired communication bears enormous personal, economical and social costs. While several assistive technologies exist, they rely on device surrogates to compensate for the lack of movement and thus provide limited utility and unnatural interface with the user. The ability of interfacing populations of neurons with super high-density multielectrode arrays (SD-MEA) can provide the sensing from and control of bionics devices by thought. Here we propose a neurointerfacing approach using SD-MEAs coated with carbon nanotubes and high-speed computing to overcome latency and long-term electrical viability bottlenecks that are essential in assistive environments. The proposed approach provides ability for fast integration of recording/stimulation from thousands of individually addressable electrodes, while coordinating a real-time computing approach to register, recognize, analyze and respond appropriately to the biological signals from the motor neurons and sensory signals from the robotic prosthesis.