Retooling brain health care with pervasive, inexpensive, data-driven digital technologies

—– While sophisticated neuroimaging techniques such as fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) provide a significant boost in our understanding of the brain — and research studies constantly reported all over the media — they are very costly. This makes it difficult to reach the mass scale required to conduct meaningful research and to improve the brain health care of millions if not billions of people around the globe. Good news is, we are witnessing an explosion of new methods that make use of low cost, ubiquitous technologies to inform brain health prevention, diagnoses and treatments on a wide scale. Max Little’s five-minute TEDTalk A Test For Parkinson’s With A Phone Call provides a great example. Assuming the 10,000-subject experiment run by the Parkinson’s Voice Initiative is successful, we will soon have a new disease measure that is both accurate and accessible. The brain may be an amazingly complex organ, but with the right tools and some ingenuity, we can build on that complexity to find new ways to improve brain health across the full lifespan. Parkinson’s, as Little points out, afflicts over 6 million individual worldwide, but it’s just one of a number of neurological conditions that together take a terrible collective toll. Think about ADHD, concussions, depression, Alzheimer’s Disease, and more. Improving prevention and care for all these conditions faces one common obstacle: the lack of scalable assessments tha...
Source: SharpBrains - Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Cognitive Neuroscience Health & Wellness Technology Brain-health digital health fMRI innovation Internet neuroimaging Neurotechnology Source Type: blogs