Check it out for yourself at TED.com, in this inspiring talk by Amber Case. Keep an eye on your self, though.
Another one, highly recommended, is by Oliver Sacks, the famous neurologist and author (e.g., of the book Musicophilia). In this presentation, he points out an interesting link between visual hallucinations and tinnitus. Click here.
Posted in General, Understanding the Brain
It has been predicted that today (Febr. 17, 2011) one of the largest solar storms in years will reach the earth and may interfere with sensitive electronic equipment, such as GPS receivers in cars and PDAs. Also air traffic and power grids may suffer from this kind of interference.
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Solar storms, also called geomagnetic storms, are caused by solar coronal mass ejections and modify the electromagnetic fields in the ionosphere, magnetosphere and heliosphere. They usually last only one or two days and can cause auroras further away from the poles than usually. According to Wikipedia, "On March 13, 1989 a severe geomagnetic storm caused the collapse of the Hydro-Québec power grid in a matter of seconds as equipment protection relays tripped in a cascading sequence of events. Six million people were left without power for nine hours, with significant economic loss."
So how dangerous are these solar storms for life-supporting devices like pacemakers and neurostimulators? In order to answer this question, we need to understand the physical and electrical effects of solar storms. Solar storms induce fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic field. These fluctuations, in turn, can induce currents in large electrically conducting structures, such as power grids and metal pipelines, leading to damaged transformers and corrosion. Solar storms also influence the electrical currents in the magnetosphere and the ionosphere and thereby affect wireless communication that propagates through them.
So my conclusion: as long as you do not use your shortwave radio or CB set to control your implantable device remotely and you do not power it from the mains, you’re safe. Ain’t that a relief?
Wouter
"Electrical stimulation of certain hypothalamic regions in cats and rodents can elicit attack behaviour," is what we can read in Nature today. But also "Neurons activated during attack are inhibited during mating, suggesting a potential neural substrate for competition between these opponent social behaviours." If the same holds for human beings, which is highly probable, then we are not far away from the situation in which we can replace Cialis by a healthy dosis of instant neurostimulation or switch the neurostimulator to Arousal Mode No. 2 to beat the guy that left the bar with another one’s girlfriend. As long as they do not take my Erdinger, I’m fine.
Jokes aside, it is known that both regions in the brain are closely located to one another, together with the part that controls voluntary urination. So my advice: don’t try this at home.
Yesterday, Erik Kelder (NSM group, TU Delft) explained us how thin-film microbatteries can be made in silicon. These batteries seem to be naturally suited for the next generation of implantable neurostimulators. Read more about the newly initiated FP7 project at: http://www.tudelft.nl/live/pagina.jsp?id=39d5ebc3-7ec3-4b26-a298-058bb5f8a24c&lang=en
It looks like the best way to detect the onset of an epileptic insult is by doing a wavelet transform on the acquired ECoG. However, which morphological features to look at is far from trivial. For the first generation of closed-loop neurostimulators it is therefore probably best to acquire the complete ECoG signal at full resolution and do the morphological analysis in the digital domain entirely. In a later phase, the (analog) frontend (sense amplifier) can be made more specific, thereby releasing the burden from the analog-to-digital converter and the signal processing in the digital domain.
Today, we will have a meeting of the SINS program and its international consortium. In this meeting we discuss new directions in neurostimulation and -modulation, bladder stimulation for urge incontinence, new technologies for Li-Ion battery foils, implantable electrodes in silicon, neuroscience on mice, closed-loop neurostimulator operation and tinnitus. I look forward to an exciting day…
Wouter
Posted in General
The Biomedical Electronics group anno 2010. From left to right:
Rachit Mohan, Gaurav Mishra, Wu Chi Wing, Yongjia Li, Wouter Serdijn, Duan Zhao, Robin van Eijk, Chutham Sawigun, Mark Stoopman, Hossein Tajeddin, Vincent Bleeker, Wannaya Ngamkham, Menno Vastenholt, Senad Hiseni, Cees-Jeroen Bes.
Not on the photo: Andre Mansano, Sumit Bagga, Marijn van Dongen, Hamed Aminzadeh, Marcel van der Horst, Yixiong Hu
Picture taken by Unknown, 2010
Posted in General
== Invited presentation by Wouter Serdijn at ISMICT 2011 on “Moving diagnostic, monitoring and therapeutic wireless medical devices into the homes and into the body”, Montreux, Switzerland, March 30.
Posted in General
Hello World, here I am. This is actually the first post on the weblog of Wouter A. Serdijn and the Biomedical Electronics Group. Stay tuned. More information will follow shortly.
Posted in General