BCIwiki (bciwiki.com) — SpikeGadgets announced on August 12, 2026 that its hardware streams digitized neural data to a host computer over a low-latency Ethernet connection, and its TrodesNetwork API allows researchers to read spikes, local field potentials (LFP), and other data in real time, as well as send messages back to the hardware to perturb brain activity or environmental cues. This combination reduces the time from detecting a neural pattern to acting on it to milliseconds.
Two studies from Loren Frank's lab at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) demonstrate the technology. Michael Coulter and colleagues used SpikeGadgets hardware and Trodes software to continuously decode hippocampal population activity in rats, identifying moment by moment whether the hippocampus represented the animal's current location or a 'remote' location. Reward was delivered whenever the decoded representation matched an experimenter-defined remote target, independent of the rat's actual position. The rats learned to reliably generate these remote representations for reward, demonstrating for the first time that animals can volitionally engage a specific memory representation without a triggering cue or behavioral report (Coulter et al., 2025, Neuron).
A second study led by Abhilasha Joshi used theta-phase-specific optogenetic stimulation of septal parvalbumin neurons, triggered in real time off SpikeGadgets-recorded hippocampal activity, to dissociate theta rhythm and replay. The team disrupted theta-timescale spike timing without eliminating place coding, selectively impairing the animals' ability to learn challenging spatial tasks while leaving hippocampal replay intact, showing that theta coordination and replay are more dissociable mechanistically than previously assumed (Joshi et al., 2025, bioRxiv).