A fundamental aspect of medical neurotechnologies is their intervention within the nervous system, including the human brain. Developers of medical neurotechnologies must therefore confront the deeply ethical nature that such intervention entails. Accordingly, while existing regulatory agencies have traditionally limited prioritization to the risk and safety issues of medical devices, ethical and societal concerns associated with the creation, development, and …
Medical Application: ELSCI by Technology Categories
In addition to the general issues outlined above, each category of neurotechnology has ethical, legal, social, and cultural issues that are particularly salient. These are outlined below. Medical Technologies for Recording/Sensing There are multiple issues pertinent to sensing and recording devices, with privacy and data misuse being particularly relevant. These portable implementations have the intention of recording data in real-time ...
Medical Application: Social & Cultural
There are several key issues that arise when considering the social and cultural implications of neurotechnologies and the conditions on which they intervene. First, it is important to consider these interventions in the context of the social stigma that is experienced by people with disabilities and mental health conditions. The social pressures toward an approximation of species-typical functioning (“healthy” or …
Medical Application: Legal
Data Legal considerations vary depending on personal or third party use of neural data. The data collected is extremely important. First, the companies need the data for their algorithms to learn and improve. These data are extremely valuable. In fact, big data in healthcare is proposed to be worth upwards of US$78 billion by 2027. In most cases, legally individual ...
Medical Application: Ethical Issues
This section includes five key areas of ethical consideration: safety, risk, and well-being; authority, power and coercion; justice and fairness; agency and identity; and surveillance and privacy. These five areas emerged through the development of the IEEE Brain neuroethics framework and capture the main dimensions of potential ethical issues with neurotechnology across the IEEE Brain neuroethics working groups. Safety, Risk, ...
Direct Physical and Biological Modification Neurotechnology for Medical Applications
Direct Physical and Biological Modification Neurotechnology for Medical Applications While technologies in the previous categories often use electrical signals, more recent technologies have been using methods to directly interact with physical and biological modifications. While many experiments have been tried on animal models, applications on humans are still in an early development stage. An example of this category is optogenetics. …
Closed-Loop Neurotechnology for Medical Applications
Closed-Loop Neurotechnology for Medical Applications Closed-loop or feedback-controlled neurotechnologies combine measurement and stimulation with the goal of more accurately controlling the state of a specific physiological signal for therapeutic purposes. Thus, neurotechnologies belonging to this category should be able to both read from and stimulate the nervous system. For example, closed-loop systems to prevent seizures use intracranial electrodes to monitor …
Stimulating/Actuating Neurotechnology for Medical Applications
Stimulating/Actuating Neurotechnology for Medical Applications Neurotechnologies designed to provide treatment often rely on direct interaction with the nervous system to supply an external input or stimulation. Since we are not considering drugs in the scope of this framework, electrical inputs are the most common type of stimulation that can be provided with neurotechnologies. With non-invasive technologies, it is possible to …
Medical Examples Overview
Categories of Neurotechnology A multitude of neurotechnologies, with different maturity levels, belong to one or more types of medical neurotechnology. For example, there may be technologies for physical modification that also involve stimulation. In that case, the ethical, legal, social, and cultural issues for both classifications should be considered. Some neurotechnologies have been used for decades and are part of …
Recording/Sensing Neurotechnology for Medical Applications
Recording/Sensing Neurotechnology for Medical Applications To better diagnose and treat medical conditions it is often helpful to access and measure the state of the brain and the nervous system. For the case of neural recording, there are different types of signals that can be measured and that have been identified as viable proxies of brain and nervous system activity: namely, …
