Biochips: Electrical Biosensors: Peripheral Nerve Sensors

Abstract

While the central nervous system (CNS) provides many data storage and processing functions of interest to neuroscientists, creating a robust artificial interface to record these signals has proven difficult. In contrast, the peripheral nervous system is responsible mainly for signal transmission. These signals, however, contain a large amount of information that could be very useful to medical science. For example, lower motor neurons carry muscle activation signals that do not require decoding—a large advantage compared with their complex cortical equivalents. Similarly, nerves provide a connection between various biological sensors and their associated control systems; a suitable peripheral neural interface would allow us to robustly monitor a large variety of biological signals such as blood sugar and blood pressure, as well as a variety of sensory modalities, and augment failing or insufficient biological controllers. A wide variety of designs have been demonstrated to provide biocompatible, safe electrodes capable of recovering these signals.