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The Bankinter Innovation Foundation recently launched the report “Neuroscience: beyond the brain” and organized a series of online conferences to explore key areas in neuroscience and its applications for self-understanding, skill improvement, and disease treatment. The final webinar, held on May 26, focused on advances in neurotechnology and featured experts Walter Greenleaf from Stanford University and Miri Polachek, CEO of Joy Ventures. They discussed current developments and market trends in digital health and emotional well-being technologies.
Walter Greenleaf emphasized the transformative impact of digital health neurotechnologies, particularly through the development of biomarkers and virtual/augmented reality (VR/AR) solutions delivered via cloud platforms. These technologies support prevention, diagnosis, cognitive training, assisted surgery, and distributed care, addressing conditions like addiction, chronic pain, autism, and stroke prevention. Greenleaf highlighted the significant future potential of digital therapies for elderly care.
Miri Polachek focused on neurotechnologies targeting emotional well-being, such as biofeedback, neurofeedback, cognitive stimulation, emotion recognition, brain-computer interfaces, and VR/AR. These innovations aim to improve emotion regulation, stress reduction, cognitive performance, and mindfulness, with a rapidly growing market. She noted emerging trends addressing loneliness in the elderly and workplace stress post-COVID-19. Both experts identified challenges including data privacy, high costs, cultural acceptance, and regulatory gaps as barriers to widespread neurotechnology adoption.
Solutions based on neurotechnologies are now ready for the general public, with augmented reality and virtual reality being the interfaces with the greatest future to improve our lives.
On the occasion of the launch of the report “Neuroscience: beyond the brain”, the Bankinter Innovation Foundation has organised a series of online conferences to learn about the main areas of work in neuroscience and how this science can help us to get to know ourselves better, improve our abilities or cure our diseases. This time we focus on neurotechnology.
In the fifth and final webinar, “Advances in Neurotechnologies”, held on May 26, we have had the experts of the Future Trends Forum, Walter Greenleaf, neuroscientist and developer of medical products at Stanford University and Miri Polachek, CEO at Joy Ventures and expert in the entrepreneurial ecosystem of neurotechnologies, who have talked to us aboutthe advances in this industry and the trends that are detected in the market.
Below, you can access the content of the webinars:
Digital Health
In the opinion of Walter Greenleaf, with more than three decades of experience in research and product development in the field of medical virtual reality technology, technologies related to Digital Health will have a very significant impact on healthcare.
Among the major areas of application of these neurotechnologies are:
- Prevention and well-being.
- Diagnoses and evaluations of health conditions.
- Physical and cognitive training.
- Assisted surgical interventions.
- Distributed medical care.
For Walter, the great advance in Digital Health technologies will be in the development of biomarkers that allow measuring, diagnosing and treating the cognitive and emotional state of patients, along with the application of solutions that he calls X-ray (virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR)).
This type of RX solutions will be provided from Cloud Computing platforms, and will cover a wide range of problems, such as the treatment of addictions, chronic pain or autism, and even the prevention of stroke or heart disease. Walter illustrates this with the BehaVR platform.
Regarding the greatest opportunities for the future, Walter points to those related to digital therapies for the care of the elderly.
Neurotechnology and emotional well-being.
For her part, Miri Polachek, spoke about technological innovations in the area of emotional well-being.
The technologies involved have to do with:
- Biofeedback.
- Neurofeedback.
- Cognitive stimulation (non-invasive).
- Emotion recognition.
- Brain-computer interfaces.
- Augmented reality and virtual reality.
As Miri explains, these neurotechnologies make it possible to address problemsrelated to the regulation of emotions, relaxation, stress reduction, improved cognitive performance, concentration or mindfulness.
Emotional well-being is an area of great potential and growth. As an example, just for solutions for detecting and regulating emotions, a market of 36,000 million dollars is estimated by 2021.
As examples to illustrate these innovations, Miri presented us with several success stories. Among them, we cite NYX, a startup that is currently developing a cutting-edge neurotechnology platform called Cognyx that helps improve sleep quality and reduce stress.
Regarding the most powerful trends in the immediate future (within the Covid-19 and post-Covid-19 innovations), Miri points to those aimed at combating loneliness, especially among the elderly, and avoiding stress and burnout among workers.
Finally, Miri presented the considerations to be taken into account to innovate in the area of emotional well-being:
- How to take full advantage of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence to be able to offer personalized experiences to users?
- How to leverage existing technologies to create new consumer compelling use cases?
- How to increase the scientific basis and effectiveness of existing products?
According to our experts, the barriers to overcome in order to achieve a wide use of neurotechnologies are:
- Problems around the privacy of patient data .
- The costs of the technologies involved are still high.
- The cultural barrier of citizens in the face of the use of this type of device.
- Lack of specific regulation .
You can download the full report “Neuroscience: Beyond the Brain”, and access the videos of the experts who participated in the Future Trends Forum by clicking here.
CEO en Joy Ventures
