Current Project (2023-)
Research Team: Natalia Martinez, Berkay Özbek, Peilong Feng, Ian Williams, Adrien Rapeaux, Timothy Constandinou (PI)
Collaborators: MintNeuro (Andrea Mifsud, Dorian Haci, Jonathan Casey), Andrew Jackson (Newcastle), William Muirhead (Queen Square and Francis Crick Institute).
Background
By interfacing electronic devices with the nervous system, implantable neural interfaces can sense the brain activity in real time with targeted precision and high spatial resolution for applications such as neuromonitoring in epilepsy or Brain-Machine Interfaces (BMIs) to control robotic prosthetics or communication software.
Some of the current challenges in implantable neural interfaces involve the development of minimally invasive, robust, power-efficient and safe devices. In addition to these technical challenges, widespread availability to these technologies is still limited. This is mainly due to economic factors, restrictions in regulations, capacity and scalability. One of the causes underlying this issue is the invasive and complex nature of the surgical interventions required to implant the devices, resulting in prolonged operation, hospitalisation and recovery times.
Our approach
ENGINI2, as the continuation of the ENGINI project, focuses on addressing some of these challenges by creating a low-power wireless distributed sensing neural interface together with surgical workflow and system-level considerations for a scalable translation. With a biocompatible packaging integration and a streamlined implantation process, the mm-scale intracortical probes will be capable of being used in different applications for diagnostic and rehabilitative purposes and can achieve both dense and wide sensing coverage.