Our market analysis clearly shows that we are still in the very beginning of the age of neural networks, and that many technological hurdles have to be overcome before a broader application range can be addressed, namely applications in the field of prosthetics and brain/machine interfaces. Nevertheless, many problems and issues mentioned by the interviewed academic and industrial institutions were already addressed in the INPRO project, which has to offer a variety of valuable solutions to problems that slowed down past progress in this field.
The potential impact of our system in the field of pure and applied neuroscience is significant. This INPRO system provides solutions for unmet needs in the neuroscience community, prominently by its potential and ability to experimentally validate various old and new theories. The paucity of past experimental results stems from the fact that it is virtually impossible to easily perform high-resolution multi-site recordings in vitro.
High spatiotemporal resolution recordings are necessary to study the evolution of neural network activity. Indeed, it is the transient nature of neural connections within the brain, known as synaptic plasticity, that is believed to underlie the poorly understood phenomena of learning, and hence memory. In the field of applied neuroscience, this device could be used to develop new algorithms with respect to information processing that may then be used by the IT and computing industry.