Unraveling the brain with high-density CMOS neural probes: Tackling the challenges of neural interfacing

Most of us take for granted the complex functions that our brains perform every day to enable us to think, move, and sense, but there are many diseases and disorders that affect them and lead to their partial or total loss. According to the World Health Organization, approximately 1.3 billion people worldwide are visually impaired (in 2018), more than 466 million people have disabling hearing impairment (2019), over 10 million people live with Parkinson's disease (2018), roughly 50 million people have epilepsy (2019), and nearly 50 million people live with dementia (2019) (see Figure 1). Those numbers, a high percentage of which correspond to developing countries, are expected to grow rapidly in the coming years. In 2017, the estimated annual cost of the major neurological diseases reached US$800 billion in the United States alone [1], which clearly indicates that they are rapidly becoming a major financial burden to healthcare in our society. © 2009-2012 IEEE.