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The Orion visual neuroprosthetic system, originally developed by Second Sight Medical Products, is changing parent companies again, Neurotech Reports said. Vivani Medical has agreed a reverse merger with Nasdaq-listed ClearOne under which its Cortigent unit becomes a wholly owned ClearOne subsidiary; ClearOne will be renamed Cortigent Holdings Inc. and is expected to trade as CRGT. ClearOne agreed as part of the transaction to file a Form S-1 registration statement to raise $10 million to $15 million, and Cortigent plans a pivotal trial of Orion in about 60 patients, though funding remains a challenge.

A new clinical trial at Brazil's Santos Dumont Institute will test whether brain-computer interface (BCI)-guided functional electrical stimulation (FES) can improve muscle activation and gait in people with spinal cord injury. The institute is a well-known Brazilian center for neurorehabilitation research. Registered on ClinicalTrials.gov as NCT07768930 and first posted on August 17, 2026, the study is active but not yet recruiting. The intervention involves ankle dorsiflexion rehabilitation: patients wear an EEG cap, the system detects motor-imagery-related brain signals in real time, and when an intention is detected, it triggers FES to stimulate the tibialis anterior muscle to assist ankle dorsiflexion. Primary outcomes are improvements in muscle activation patterns and gait kinematics. The trial is at an early stage, with enrollment details not yet disclosed.

A systematic review of BCI medical applications published on August 17, 2026 in Theoretical and Natural Science covers literature review, comparative case analysis of invasive vs non-invasive techniques, and interdisciplinary assessment. It reports that invasive BCIs reach 80% to 100% task success rates in robotic arm control but are limited by surgical hazards, progressive signal deterioration and costs above $250,000, while non-invasive BCIs are safer and more widely deployed in community neurorehabilitation with about 70% effectiveness for post-stroke upper-limb recovery, yet suffer poor signal-to-noise ratios, a BCI illiteracy rate near 30% and low information transfer speeds. The review also addresses neural data privacy, autonomy paradoxes and inequitable access.

Researchers propose MRieHy, a multi-feature Riemannian hypergraph framework for online test-time adaptation of motor imagery BCI decoding. It aligns multi-day distributions via Riemannian means of covariance matrices, builds one hypergraph with Riemannian distance and a second with cosine similarity, fuses them with adaptively learned weights, and decodes buffered online samples after Riemannian alignment. On a private four-class ECoG dataset and two public four-class EEG datasets, MRieHy shows notable gains over state-of-the-art baselines, targeting the cross-day transferability and online operation that clinical MI-BCI still lacks.

Southern Federal University recorded directional-word EEG from 22 healthy volunteers: 12 native Russian speakers and 10 native Spanish speakers. Both groups performed six directional words, with an additional “next” command in Russian. Recordings used 38 electrodes at 500 Hz, with concurrent articulation-related EMG in six participants. Random Forest accuracy of 78 ± 4% came from per-participant five-fold cross-validation distinguishing rest, overt speech and inner speech—not six-word recognition. Keypress, muscle and task-order effects require consideration in subsequent analyses.

Eleven Chinese provincial-level jurisdictions had published prices for brain-computer interface medical services. The invasive implantation fee runs from RMB 4,389 at the lowest hospital tier in Sichuan to RMB 7,980 in Beijing (approx. $650 to $1,180 at RMB 6.74 to the dollar, the mid-August 2026 rate), and the non-invasive fitting fee from RMB 643 to 990. Sichuan, Hainan, Qinghai and Xinjiang tier prices by hospital grade, Shanghai leaves the amount to each hospital, and Jiangsu's three figures appear only in a July 2025 draft. Beijing lists all three fees as Class A at four named hospitals; Zhejiang covers the fitting fee as Class B, limited to prosthetic fitting. Sichuan, Jiangxi, Hainan, Qinghai and Xinjiang assign Class C, Shanghai excludes the fees, and Hubei and Guangdong have prices without a coverage decision.

A paper in *Neurorehabilitation and Neural Repair* examines the outcome measures needed as implantable motor BCIs move from safety and feasibility studies toward regulatory approval, reimbursement and sustained clinical use. It calls for valid and reliable assessments that satisfy regulators and payers while reflecting activities that matter to people with severe motor impairment.

The US Food and Drug Administration cleared CN-Suite, source localization software from FIND Surgical Sciences Inc., doing business as FIND Neuro, on August 16, 2026, finding it substantially equivalent under submission number K260563 via the Traditional 510(k) pathway. FDA lists the device as Source Localization Software for Electroencephalograph or Magnetoencephalograph, a Class II device under regulation number 882.1400, reviewed by the agency's neurology advisory committee. Such software works back from electrical or magnetic fields recorded at the scalp to the intracranial origin of the signal, supporting presurgical planning such as locating epileptic foci.