Massachusetts General Hospital

A workshop at the BCI Society Meeting 2025, run with the Implantable BCI Collaborative Community (iBCI-CC), took up how clinical outcome assessments (COAs) for pivotal BCI trials should be selected, developed and validated. Participants pointed to patient heterogeneity, the absence of widely validated COAs, and the difficulty of capturing outcomes that matter in home and daily-life settings. The discussion lays groundwork for the iBCI-CC Clinical Study Endpoints Workgroup to build a transparent process for identifying meaningful aspects of health and concepts of interest, in support of regulatory approval and reimbursement.

UC Davis researchers trained a transformer-based speech decoder across six people with intracortical BCIs. The pooled model cut relative word error rates by more than 50% on average compared with subject-only models and, after fine-tuning on fewer than 200 sentences from an unseen user, achieved a word error rate below 7%. The bioRxiv preprint has not been peer reviewed.

Two people with tetraplegia typed on a virtual two-handed QWERTY keyboard simply by attempting finger movements, which electrodes implanted in the brain decoded into keystrokes. Typing speed was set by the users and reached 110 characters per minute, or 22 words per minute, with a word error rate of 1.6%, which the authors say resembles able-bodied typing accuracy. Accurate decoding required as few as 30 calibration sentences, and a 5-gram language model improved sentence output. One participant has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and the other a spinal cord injury.