The FDA has approved a permanent brain-computer interface implant in a patient with a brain disease.
The implant is made by Brooklyn-based Synchron, a competitor of Elon Musk’s Neuralink, and was inserted into the man’s brain at Mount Sinai Health System in New York City.
Synchron thus sets a new standard for brain chip technology
As part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, it has already been announced that more and more people will be wearing brain implants soon, among other things, to make people “smarter” or cure diseases.
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Elon Musk is one of the pioneers of this technology with his Neuralink brain chips, experiments have been conducted on animals (here and here).
The brain-computer interface allows the man, who suffers from the fatal neurodegenerative disease ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) and can no longer move or speak, to control computers using only his thoughts.
He is now testing the ability of a BCI, called a stentrode, to translate his thoughts into commands that he can use to communicate and surf the Internet on a computer.
BCI is a pillar of transhumanism, he said.
The U.S. patient is the fifth person in the world to be implanted with a BCI, likened to a “brain Bluetooth,” as part of the company Synchron’s COMMAND trial for the device after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted its first investigational device exemption (IDE) for a permanent BCI implant.
The other four participants in the study are in Australia and have successfully used the stentrode for a year to perform basic tasks such as email and online shopping. Reportedly without serious side effects.
Synchron published a video of an Australian participant using the BCI to control a computer.
COMMAND’s lead researcher, Dr. David Putrino, told the journal Psychology Today that what sets the stentrode apart from previously researched BCI technologies is its “practical utility.” This means it can be used outside of a laboratory, he said.
According to Psychology Today, the stentrode is located in a large blood vessel between the brain’s two hemispheres and is connected to a device in the chest that an external device can charge.
The Synchron implant itself uses the brain’s signal for attempted movement to power the brain-computer interface.
The way it works is when the patient thinks about movement, the implant’s recording technology will be able to identify that something has lit up in the brain.
The artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning algorithms that are being trained on the data from the implant learn to associate brain signals with different computer commands over time.
“An external receiver connected to the chest device converts brain activity into commands and wirelessly transmits the commands to a computer,” the magazine explains.
Thus, the BCI allows users to perform various functions on external devices, including writing and online banking.
SYNCHRON
Tom Oxley founded Synchron, a neural interface technology startup, in 2016 with CTO Nicholas Opie with investors that include Max Hodak and Khosla Ventures.
Oxley completed an endovascular neurosurgery fellowship at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, performed over 1,600 endovascular neurosurgeries, and published over 100 peer-reviewed scientific papers.
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