The Market for Neurotechnology

Abstract

Biomedical technologies represent one of the most promising and profitable new industry groups of the 21^st century. Spurred on by medical developments and discoveries that cure disease, alleviate suffering, and generally improve the quality of life, many leading research institutions and health-care firms have gained the world's attention and respect in recent years. Within the biomedical technology industries, there is one field that stands out not only for its promise of restoring function to human patients, but also for carrying over biomedical concepts and processes to the industrial and information processing sectors. That field is what we call neurotechnology. Unlike the field of biotechnology, which concerns itself with pharmacological and genetic engineering efforts to understand and control DNA, genetic material, and other complex biological molecules, neurotechnology is concerned with electronic and engineering methods of understanding and controlling nervous system function. Some of the very early firms in the neurotechnology field have scored great success, building devices that restore hearing to deaf people, restore arm and hand function to quadriplegics, and accomplish a host of other feats using techniques of functional electrical stimulation of the human body. Neurotech Reports believes that government and private research funding in this area will lead to one of the great spinoffs of our time as biomedical engineers apply their knowledge and experience building devices that sense and stimulate the human nervous system to non-human systems, such as computers, training systems, and virtual reality. Although medical devices and neural prosthetics is just one application area of neurotechnology, it is likely that advances in this area will serve as a catalyst for spinoffs in other application areas, such as information processing, training and simulation, and entertainment.