Neural Interface Engineering Linking the Physical World and the Nervous System

Following recent worldwide advocations on brain-related research and bioelectric medicine, neurotechnologies have become one of the hottest scientific and technological frontiers attracting enormous academic and public interests. Not only are governments and private foundations generously investing in this field, but many industrial giants like Facebook, Google, and GlaxoSmithKline together with new startups like Neuralink and Kernel are also enthusiastically stepping into this venture.

As the projected technological market is expanding unprecedentedly, interests in further learning the neurotechnological developments are growing fast in both the technical community and the general public.

In developing such body-machine symbiotic systems, the scientific community recognized the neural interfaces as the technological bottleneck hindering further advance of the field. As a result, tremendous efforts have been invested on neural interface engineering, leading to booming of this area over the past decade with a variety of exciting new developments. This book thus focuses on this important topic of neural interface engineering.

This book is targeted for graduate and advanced undergraduate students of bioengineering, biomedical engineering, applied physiology, biological engineering, applied physics, and related fields; for biomedical engineers, neuroscientists, neurophysiologists,

and industry professionals wishing to take advantage of the latest and greatest in this emerging area; and for medical practitioners using products of this field. Readers in public services and government funding agencies may also find this book useful in learning the latest in the field. This book provides an introduction to and summary of representative major neural interfacing technologies used to directly transmit signals between the physical world and the nervous system with the ultimate goals for repairing, restoring, and even augmenting body functions. It offers the readers a unique opportunity to obtain a panorama of this vibrant area in a handy format while elaborating the most important new developments. It covers classic noninvasive and invasive approaches for neural interfacing, as well as recent emerging techniques including advanced implantable neural electrodes and nanomaterial-assisted and genetically engineered neural interfaces.