Dr Philip Low is a neuroscientist working in La Jolla, California. He is 30 years old. He is also on the verge, so he believes, of revolutionising the study of sleep and sleep disorders, changing the way we diagnose sleep disorders and disease, and, as he puts it “to give people access to their own brain.”
This sounds fairly grandiose stuff. What does it actually mean? Well, the advance he’s talking about it the Ibrain, a small device which uses a single electrode to do what has previously taken a lot more effort, equipment and time. This, so Dr Low believes, will lead to almost a real-time interpretation of brain events during sleep- in a recent demonstration he transmitted a patient’s brain-wave details directly to someone’s mobile phone!
He’s also looking at ways to improve the algorithms of analysis, speeding up the process of interpreting the results. If he can achieve this, then what it means is that sleep-disordered patients will be able to get quick and simple insights into their conditions. This should, then, lead to quicker diagnosis and easier identification of the relevant modes of treatment. I think we would all agree that this is a very good thing.
Another possibility is that this will also open up new avenues in research- the more data we have, the more likely we are to increase and improve our understanding of what actually happens to the brain during sleep, and when a person is suffering from Sleep Apnea, or any other sleep disturbance for that matter. As with any field of scientific research, as new avenues open up, so new discoveries follow.
The future, it would seem, is an interesting place.
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