oday, when a stroke impairs your mobility, a doctor might prescribe a cane to help you walk. In the future, instead of a cane, you might get a robotic exosuit installed with a program that anticipates your every step, so you can smoothly walk down the street without giving it a thought. That’s just one of a slew of technologies emerging from multiple multidisciplinary BU labs that promise not only to change the way we see and understand the human brain, but also to restore function to people impacted by neurological disorders, helping them to again navigate their homes and communities. Professor David Boas (BME, ECE), founder and director of the BU Neurophotonics Center, calls this cohering, multifaceted field Neuroscience in the Everyday World (NEW). “These are technologies that are really advancing our ability to measure brain function and brain behavior under naturalistic conditions,” Boas says. “So we’re taking neuroscience out of the lab and into the everyday world.”
USING LIGHT TO UNDERSTAND THE BRAIN Boas and colleagues have developed one of the most prominent of the NEW technologies: wearable functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). There are a few variations on wearable fNIRS for different applications, but they all use light to track the flow of blood to the different regions of the brain as a way to learn which neurons are David Boas activated by what stimuli and behaviors. (BME, ECE) For three decades, the standard way to track blood flow in the brain has been functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). “That revolutionized our understanding of the brain,” says Boas. “It requires the subject, however, to lie down inside a magnet, and when they’re inside the magnet, they can’t be engaging in actual naturalistic tasks.” Near-infrared light can be used in neural imaging because it can travel far into brain tissue, but it’s absorbed by hemoglobin. “So if the amount of hemoglobin in the brain changes, as it does during brain activity, it will change the amount of absorbed light, and we can detect that,” says Boas. Subjects in fNIRS studies wear a kind 18 B U C O L L E G E O F E N G I N E E R I N G