[APPLAUSE] Good morning. Well, thank you, Bert, for that introduction. Hopefully, you will do lunch with me. I'm excited to be here this morning and share this fascinating and very fast-developing area with you of neurotechnology. It holds great promise for humanity. It also moves the hacking target much closer to the individual than it is even today. Identity security has never been this important as it is today, especially as neurotechnology moves ever closer from fiction to reality.
In this session, we will define what neurotechnology is. We will look at how it works. We'll look at the current state today of this technology. And we will touch on some of the really intricate and plentiful, unfortunately, issues and challenges introduced for privacy, ethics, et cetera in this space. And we'll continually tie it back to what we're here for, to understand what our jobs are, what we need to do as identity security professionals.
We do see today this technology really moving at pace from what used to be science fiction to fiction to reality. And I'll just pause on four quick examples, all possible today if you look at what's happening both in the research and also already available to general public as products. The first is brain implants in Lou Gehrig's disease patients that takes thought to word processing with 96% accuracy, thought to word processing. And that accuracy is better than my typing, I can assure you.
Secondly, [INAUDIBLE] trialing, wearable neurotechnology, helmets really that monitor the-- analyzes the brain activity to see whether that student is paying attention in class, a green light going on on that helmet if they're paying attention, a red light if they don't. It's an idea for [INAUDIBLE] for the next Unite Conference maybe. And we're talking about technology that is feasible and being trialed today.
The third one is, again, another successful trial, and we'll cover it a little bit more detail when we look at how neurotechnology works. It's paraplegic patients being able to use neurotechnology to simply think about walking and that driving an exoskeleton that allows them to walk today.
And the last one, again, we'll look at a little bit more detail when we look at where neurotechnology is today. And that's for epilepsy sufferers. We use neurotechnology in real time today to monitor brain activity, recognize when a seizure is imminent, even when the patient can't recognize it themselves, stimulate the brain directly to stop that seizure before it takes place. This is the technology that I'll be talking about today.
And to give you an idea, this is not a niche market, of the size of this market. Last year, already, we saw $13 billion in this market. And it's set to double by 2028. So substantial and growing fast. Alongside, as you would expect, is what we're here to look at primarily alongside all that promise, increasing awareness of the challenges, the issues that is introduced by this technology.
And here, we are talking not just about freedom of speech. We're talking about freedom of thought. Think about that. The issues we're thinking about here is mining thoughts for cash. You get to a point where you start wondering about the very human identity itself. That's the issues potentially introduced here.
So remember when de-perimeterization really started gathering some pace. When having a couple of firewalls, demilitarized zone wasn't enough for our production systems. We saw an increase in direct attacks in the scale and intensity of attacks directly to our products, to our production systems, databases, our applications.
As DBAs, sys progs, application developers, we really had to step up what we did in security. And identity security really moved to the center of what we see as the frontier of security. With this area, with neurotechnology, the mind is becoming the new frontier of security. With identity security, absolutely crucial for us to be able to take advantage of the promise of this technology going forward.
And let me make it a bit more personal. It's not the mind. It's your mind. It's my mind that will be the frontier of security. Think about that for a second. The mind is that which thinks. It's how you perceive pain, pleasure, memory. When you make decisions, it really-- the mind is us. And that is the frontier of security. Think it was difficult to get your production systems and data compromised? Imagine, if you will, your very mind being compromised. I've never quite scared myself as much as with this one when I did research in this area, much more than any other area, I can tell you.
In fiction, we've seen what is neurotechnology really moving from science fiction to fiction to reality increasingly. Now, I know there's absolutely no one in this audience. It's old enough to have seen The Six Million Dollar Man originally. So I'll explain a little bit about this. Colonel Steve Austin, a plane crash, loses a bunch of limbs, eye, and so on. So he gets bionic parts to replace what is lost. Neurotechnology controls these bionic parts. Faster, stronger than ever. Fantastic. Gives us a great vision of what is possible. And I'll show you how some of that is possible today.
Move on to The Matrix. A little bit more of a chilling picture of what is possible through essentially neurotechnology. If you can really control a person's mind, their very mind, their brain activity, you can make them potentially believe anything. They are in a completely different reality. That is the potential here.
And we have in the audience today an author of a book of fiction, where the central theme is essentially hacking part of the body. And Taking Up Serpents, Ian, if I'm correct, was published about seven years ago. So our vice president of EMEA in Sutherland is the author of this book. And Ian, thinking about the main topic there, it feels like a lot of that
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