BCIwiki (bciwiki.com) — Sixteen bodies in China's Shandong province, led by the Health Commission (山东省卫生健康委员会), together with the provincial Party organisation and financial affairs offices, the development and reform, education, science and technology, industry and information technology, finance, human resources, commerce, state-owned assets, market regulation, healthcare security, big data and medical products departments and the provincial financial regulator, issued the Work Plan for Accelerating Clinical Translation and Application Innovation of Brain-Computer Interfaces under document number Lu Wei Yi Zi [2026] No. 13, dated July 7, 2026 and released on July 8, 2026.
Working through an alliance, application scenarios, policy support and industrial follow-through, the plan sets targets in four steps. In 2026 the province is to establish and operate a BCI clinical research alliance and launch a first batch of validation projects. By 2027 it aims for about 20 breakthroughs in frontier and core technologies and about 30 innovative technology SMEs. By 2028 the alliance should have at least 30 members spanning tertiary hospitals, research institutes, companies and contract research organisations inside and outside the province, more than 20 domestic and foreign teams should have set up validation bases or joint laboratories in Shandong, more than 30 multicentre validation projects should be complete, the provincial BCI industry should reach 2 billion yuan, and one to two chain-leading firms and more than ten specialised firms should exist. By 2030 it expects a national cluster for BCI clinical validation and industrial development.
The plan contains 14 measures. On the clinical side these include an alliance with an expert committee and working groups, regular publication of clinical needs lists focused on psychiatric, neurological and rehabilitation fields, standardised procedures for participant screening and enrolment, experimental paradigm design, rehabilitation protocols, efficacy assessment and data sharing, and a multimodal standardised dataset with a provincial clinical database. On translation and industry they include a provincial proof-of-concept centre at the Jinan International Medical Centre, Class II medical device review cut to 90 working days, 500,000 yuan in start-up funding with up to 15 million yuan in equity investment, and inclusion of the field in the province's flagship talent programme.