Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have traditionally required surgeons to remove sections of skull to accommodate electronics roughly the size of a deck of cards, which unsurprisingly, has been quite a tough sell. Now though, a new system (BISC) fits on a chip so thin you could slip it between skull and brain, no saws required.
The numbers are impressive: 65,536 electrodes, 100 Mbps wireless data transfer and a footprint of 3 cubic millimetres. For context, that's faster than home broadband and smaller than a grain of rice, though considerably more expensive.
The practical applications run from the conservative (epilepsy management, restoring motor function) to the groundbreaking (brain-to-AI interfaces), though the researchers are diplomatically focusing on the medical uses for now. Short-term human studies are now underway.
Image from Kampto Neurotech
🧐 What's in it for me? For now, the immediate beneficiaries (i.e. within 10 years) are people with neurological conditions who've been waiting for implants that don't require the surgical equivalent of home renovation.
💵 Out of the Lab: Brain-computer interfaces are transitioning from lab curiosities to commercial products, but most designs still require a lot of hardware or electrodes that damage cortical tissue. If BISC's chip continues to perform through trials, we may see a total paradigm shift.
Kampto Neurotech, spun out of Columbia and Stanford, is commercialising BISC and preparing for clinical trials. Early-stage with many unknowns, but potentially transformative.
Neuralink has the highest profile but uses penetrating electrodes rather than surface arrays giving a very different surgical risk profile.
Precision Neuroscience is developing competing thin-film cortical arrays, suggesting the surface-electrode approach has momentum.
Until next time, stay curious.
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