While most of the new health features offered recently by Apple have focussed on cardio health, there is growing evidence that the Cupertino company may be exploring other emerging areas in health tech.
One of these areas is pain management and associated neurotechnology including brain-computer interfaces.
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Apple is looking for resources that can help to investigate the neural, physiological, and psychosocial aspects of pain, pain management, pain-related neural plasticity, biomarkers, and/or therapies.
Linking computers to human minds have long been a staple of science fiction. But now it’s closer to reality, with huge implications for healthcare, technology, and even the future of the species.
This is evident from a recent job posting at Apple this month.
The new ‘Pain and Health Computational Scientist’ position at Apple is designed to achieve objectives related to this emerging frontier in health technology.
According to the job description, this position requires the following key experience:
- Experience investigating social and cultural factors that influence the experience of and judgments about pain
- Experience investigating emotional, cognitive, and perceptual factors that influence pain experience
- Experience using convergent methods across self-report, behavioral, and physiological data to draw conclusions and provide insights about pain-related experience, judgment, and behaviors
- Deep expertise in experimental design, statistical analysis, and predictive modeling, including advanced experience with signal processing, time-frequency analysis, and machine learning, and their application to understanding pain and pain management.
- Hardware and software experience with multimodal data acquisition and instrumentation
- Experience with integrating psychological and physiological measures into brain-computer interfaces and neurofeedback a plus
- Fluent in numerical computing and proficient in various programming languages (e.g., Python, Matlab, ML, and deep learning toolboxes)
Brian-computer interfaces are an emerging area in the field of neurotechnology. There are multiple companies leading efforts in this promising area. One of these companies is Kernel. The company today offers the Kernel Flow.
Flow is a non-invasive, full-coverage, optical headset that can be used in nearly any environment for recording real-time cortical hemodynamics to establish precise patterns of brain activity.
In the case of Apple, they are probably looking to build out complex quantitative models. The new resource will help Apple build machine learning models to improve our understanding of pain and pain management.
The position requires a Doctorate in Systems, Cognitive or Computational Neuroscience, Psychology, Biomedical Engineering, Applied Mathematics, or related expertise. 5+ years postdoctoral experience, Industry research experience a plus.
