Wearable Neuromodulation Devices for Optimization of Human Health and Performance

Noninvasive neuromodulation systems and devices are used every day around the world for research, to treat medical indications, to enhance human performance, and in other consumer wellness and electronics applications. Our scientific, technical, and engineering efforts have led to the development and deployment of several unique methods, which will be discussed. These transdermal electrical nerve stimulation methods include trigeminal nerve stimulation and transdermal auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS), which have been shown to modulate sympathetic tone and enhance brain plasticity by affecting the activity of the locus coeruleus and norepinephrine signalling. We will describe collective efforts using trigeminal nerve stimulation and taVNS to provide active control of sympathetic nervous system activity for regulating alertness, attention, stress, anxiety, learning, and sleep/wake cycles. In all cases, we will discuss the central role of quantitative psychophysiological and neurophysiological biomarkers in the iterative development, validation, and verification of these noninvasive neuromodulation methods. Emerging machine learning and artificial intelligence methods now promise to mine large data sets from similarly connected biosensors in real-world environments. Therefore, we will discuss how these approaches are being integrated with noninvasive neuromodulation methods in open-loop and closed-loop manners to develop personalized approaches, advance our understanding of brain and behavior, and enable the optimization of human health and performance.