Research · Perception · Electroreception
Every nerve, muscle and heartbeat throws off a faint voltage; every live wire, a field. A camera sees none of it. Electroreception is the sense sharks and rays have and humans lack — reading electric and bioelectric fields directly. It opens two closed domains: the body's own electrical activity, and the electrical state of infrastructure. What differs between approaches is only how the sensor couples to the source — from gel on skin to an implant to no contact at all.
Four ways to turn a voltage or field into a signal, split by domain — the body versus infrastructure — and by how close the sensor must get. From the clinic's gold standard to the implanted frontier; a focused set, not an exhaustive list.
Maturity — deployable today · Opportunity — untapped headroom. Ordinal 1–5, our synthesis of the cited reviews — not a measured index.
Field or potential → pickup → signal → model. The four pickups are interchangeable front-ends on one read-then-decide backbone — and for bioelectronic medicine, the backbone also writes back.
Some close the loop. A bioelectronic implant reads a nerve's electrical traffic, a model decides, and it stimulates the nerve back — a therapy delivered as a signal, not a drug. That read-and-write loop is what separates electroreception from a passive monitor.