Elon Musk said: Social media platform On Monday, he announced that the first human patient had received a brain implant developed by his company Neuralink.
rear years of delay, Neuralink received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and hospital ethics committees and began recruiting patients for its clinical trial in the fall. The company is developing a device called a brain-computer interface.
Musk has said that Neuralink’s ultimate goal is to “achieve symbiosis with artificial intelligence,” but for now he says the company’s goal is to allow paralyzed people to control cursors and keyboards with their brains. He said he is starting with much more modest goals.in Research brochure, Neuralink says it is recruiting participants who are at least 22 years old and have quadriplegia, or paralysis of all four limbs, due to cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The study is expected to take six years to complete.
The company says in its brochure that it will use a surgical robot it has developed to place implants in areas of the brain that control motor intentions. Once installed, this coin-sized device is designed to record brain signals and transmit them wirelessly to an app that decodes them.
In a post on Monday, Musk said the patient was “recovering well,” adding: “Early results show promise in detecting neuron spikes.” But it could be several months before patients know whether they can use the implant to control computers or other devices. This person will need to recover from the surgery and may take several weeks to be trained to use the BCI.
The Neuralink patient is not the first patient to develop a BCI. Dozens of people around the world have been fitted with the device as part of a research study. First Matt Nagle accomplished this in his 2004. Over the years, these systems have enabled people with paralysis to play video games, move robotic arms, and write emails using just their thoughts.
Until recently, BCI was primarily studied by academic research institutions. It required a cumbersome setup with thick cables, making it impractical for home use. Neuralink’s system is designed to be wireless, recording neural activity through more than 1,000 electrodes distributed across his 64 threads, each thinner than a human hair. The Utah array, the most common device used in BCI research, records from 100 electrodes.
The company has also been plagued by controversy, particularly over its treatment of research animals. A WIRED investigation in September detailed how some monkeys died as a result of the company’s brain implant experiments. The company is reportedly under federal investigation in connection with its treatment of animal subjects. And this month, Reuters report Neuralink has been fined for violating U.S. Department of Transportation regulations regarding the movement of hazardous materials.
Since Neuralink was founded in 2016, several companies have emerged to commercialize these systems. One of its competitors, New York-based Synchron, has not only beaten Neuralink in implanting BCIs into the human body, but its devices are also safe and allow paralyzed patients to browse the web from the comfort of their own homes. It showed that you can browse, shop online and do banking transactions.
Neuralink did not say where the trial would take place or how many patients would participate.The company is patient register To find out whether potential participants are eligible to participate in the study.is not registered in ClinicalTrials.gova central database containing information about clinical research funded or sponsored by industry and government agencies.
For now, detailed information about the Neuralink surgery is only available from Musk’s tweets. It may not move the needle on human-AI fusion, but it will be an important milestone for a promising device.
