Preface to ‘Advanced neurotechnologies: translating innovation for health and well-being’

Abstract

In the nervous system, huge amounts of neurons constantly induce and transmit electrophysiological signals to communicate between neurons and brain regions. Innovative neurotechnologies have added significantly to neural engineering and have led directly to many fundamental scientific insights into the function of the central and peripheral nervous systems. This issue addressed the novel approaches toward biocompatible neural interfaces, thin and flexible electronics and wireless circuits and systems, which will allow readers to identify the requirements, challenges and future directions related to biointegrated implantable neurotechnologies. Additionally, this special issue aims to report the latest advances and future trends of critical techniques and frameworks in implantable neural devices, which will allow biomedical researchers to identify new opportunities. The theme issue starts with a research article by Lee & Fried [1], which aims to show that innovative magnetic stimulation of the visual cortex (V1) using microcoils induces spatially confined activation in the secondary visual cortex (V2) in mouse brain slices. They demonstrated that, compared with the traditional electrical stimulation, the microcoils-based magnetic stimulation is better for confining the activation to a small region in V1 and produces more precise and sustained