Establishing Reporting Standards for Emerging Neurotechnology Research

In today’s scientific field, the ability to interact with the brain has become much more accessible. This accessibility has allowed for great leaps in understanding, diagnoses, and interventions in healthcare for the previously untreatable. Imaging allows for researchers to study and visualize the complex networks formed in the brain during different tasks. Electrical interventions allow for robotic prosthetics to predict movements from neural activity or to stop errant pain signals from causing a person undue distress. More recently, organoids have been able to create brains in dish allowing for even more detailed work in dissecting and diagramming the function of the brain. These avenues of investigation open up a world of possibilities for the future of health care.



Neurotechnology is a complex field of research and clinical applications. These technologies span across imaging techniques, neural electrodes, brain-computer interfaces, and more. However, for each successfully published paper a new method for presenting and interpreting results is published as well. The final stage of scientific discovery is communicating the results of an experiment such that others can test those methods in their labs to confirm the results. However, with no standard set of data being present across all papers, confusion and misinterpretation of that data arises. What is proposed here is a collection of papers that will provide a template for scientists within the neurotechnology field to refer to when deciding how to present results. Inspired by Maria Asplund’s 2020 paper for standardized performance testing for electrodes, I want to provide a collection of papers that explain or highlight the importance of standardized testing and report resulting across multiple neurotechnologies.



The goal for this topic is to invite leaders in the field to suggest a standard set of testing and data analysis to help compare future technologies against one another in a meaningful and clear way. The neurotechnology in question is not of import and a wide variety of neurotechnology is encouraged to promote communication across disciplines. This topic invites authors to share their methodologies in experimentation and analysis – highlighting the data that can be not only useful within the field of study, but outside of it as well. Papers including explanations and statistical analysis are encouraged. Authors are additionally encouraged to provide proposed experiments to help normalize datasets across their specific field provided they are accessible to the scientific community in question.