Medicosnext
Neuralink Corporation is a neuro technology company founded by Elon Musk and others in 2016 with its headquarters in San Francisco. Its team of extraordinarily talented scientists is working to develop a fully integrated brain machine interface (BMI) system—sometimes called a brain computer interface (BCI)—that enables a computer (or other digital devices like mobile phones) to communicate directly with the brain, through which for example, a paralyzed person can control a computer mouse or keyboard. Likewise, information, such as restoring the sense of touch, can be written back into the brain. Safety is a major factor for consideration, because the system must have fully wireless communication through the skin, and patients have to be able to take it home for self-use.
Micron-scale threads are inserted the brain in areas that control movement (the company is developing a robot that can precisely insert many threads through a single 8 mm skull opening, avoiding blood vessels on the brain surface.), each thread having many small and flexible electrodes that can detect neural signals. The threads are connected to a sealed, implanted device—the Link—that can process, stimulate, and transmit neural signals. The device has a compact inductive charger to wirelessly charge the battery from the outside. With a Bluetooth connection, the Neuralink app would allow a person to control an iOS device, keyboard, and mouse just by thinking about it.
Currently, only a few approved devices for recording or stimulating from the human brain are available. These include deep brain stimulation (DBS) devices that can treat neurological disorders like Parkinson’s disease, and devices that can detect and disrupt seizures. Because they are designed to modulate whole brain area activity, rather than transferring information to and from the brain, they have far fewer electrodes (fewer than 10) than the Link (which will be able to record from 1024 electrodes), which are also much larger in size than the Link’s electrodes.
