The era of bioelectronic healthcare is dawning upon us. As electronic systems shrink in size and improve in functionality, we see more and more emerging devices that can track vital signs, such as heart rate and blood pressure, realising the grand vision of highly connected sensor nodes monitoring patients’ health beyond the hospital doors. The real revolution in digital healthcare, however, lies in bringing not only the diagnostics but also the therapy to the patient which requires interfacing the world of electronics with biology.

Interfacing the nervous system provides an immense opportunity to observe (through recording) and modify (through stimulation) the functional state of the biological system to fundamentally understand various diseases and health conditions, and to ultimately develop suitable therapies through closed-loop systems [1]. Consequently, a host of neural interface modalities, with varying levels of invasiveness, have been developed over the past decades. Among all, interfacing at the individual neuron level allows the highest level of information transfer from the brain.

Despite the success of devices such as Cochlear Implants, interfacing at the individual neuron level is still severely limited due to challenges such as selectivity (for stimulation) and thermal-limitations imposed on data transmission to prevent neural tissue damage. The latter is a major bottleneck in improving information transfer rate of neural recording systems as they scale up. Hence, there is currently a tremendous drive to develop new enabling technologies for neuroscience to provide insightful views on how motor or sensory information is represented and transformed by the brain, as well as revealing how this complex system is affected by neurological injuries and disease.

USA: A cross-sectional study comprising 2,822 US adults revealed that worse examination-based and self-reported vision impairment is associated with anxiety and depressive symptoms, and worse examination-based vision impairment is linked with severe social isolation.

These findings, published in JAMA Ophthalmology, provide evidence to support prioritizing research aimed at enhancing the health and inclusion of people with vision impairment.

Vision impairment and psychosocial function, including symptoms of anxiety, depression and social isolation, are a major cause of morbidity in the US. However, there is a lack of nationally representative studies evaluating associations between subjective and objective vision impairment with psychosocial function following the COVID-19 pandemic.

Experts from Michigan Medicine answer questions about brain health and how to prevent Alzheimer’s disease.

Learn more about the Michigan Alzheimer’s Disease Center at University of Michigan Health: https://alzheimers.med.umich.edu/

Chapters.

Intro: 00:00:00

Dementia vs. Alzheimer’s: 00:02:50

How does dementia differ from general memory concerns? 00:04:50.

According to a study published in the BMJ, a person’s chance of surviving cardiac arrest while receiving cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) in a hospital is 22%, but that declines rapidly after only one minute to less than 1% after 39 minutes. The likelihood of leaving with no major brain damage is similar, declining from 15% after one minute of CPR to less than 1% after 32 minutes without a heartbeat.

Only around 25% of patients survive to hospital discharge after being admitted to the emergency department for cardiac arrest. This common catastrophic medical emergency with a high mortality rate is an important public health issue, affecting around 300,000 adults every year in America alone. Unfortunately, studies have shown that long resuscitation times are linked to lower odds of survival, but there are no specific recommendations on when to stop resuscitation.

This study was designed to measure the effects of CPR duration, using the largest cardiac dataset in the world, utilizing data from 348,996 adults with an average age of 67 years old who experienced an in-hospital cardiac arrest. CPR was defined as the interval between the start of compression and the first return of spontaneous circulation (ROSC) or the termination of resuscitation. The main measures of interest were survival to discharge and favorable function at discharge, defined as a brain performance score of 1 representing good cerebral performance, and 2 representing moderate cerebral disability on a 5-point scale.

Contrary to popular perception, traumatic brain injury (TBI) is not the reserve of car accidents and punishing contact sports; it’s surprisingly common. Up to 50 million new cases of traumatic brain injury are registered each year worldwide. Notably, 80% of TBI occurs in low-to middle-income countries, and it is also the leading cause of death and disability in young adults. Overall, the global economic burden of TBI is estimated at 400 billion USD.

Minimising the devastating effects of TBI doesn’t rely solely on reducing the risk of an injury; it’s also essential to improve treatment after one has happened. For that, physiological real-time monitoring of vital signals is critical. One inventor has made it his mission to create devices that can do this accurately, easily, anywhere, and what’s more, they are also non-invasive.

Professor Arminas Ragauskas is a founder and director of the Health Telematics Science Institute at Kaunas University of Technology in Lithuania, which develops innovative industrial and physiological measurement and process monitoring technologies. He is particularly known for his work on non-invasive intracranial pressure and cerebral blood flow autoregulation measurement devices. He was also the national coordinator of the CENTER-TBI project, funded by the European Commission and the EU industry, with a budget of 40 million EUR, and focused European efforts to advance the care of patients with traumatic brain injury.