China

Can a non-invasive brain-computer interface read motor intention and, combined with spinal cord stimulation and exoskeleton training, improve function after spinal cord injury? Xuanwu Hospital, Capital Medical University has registered a single-arm exploratory trial that plans to enroll 10 patients aged 18 to 65 with spinal cord injury. The intervention combines all three into one rehabilitation regimen. The primary outcome is the overall clinical efficacy rate 6 months after surgery; secondary outcomes include improvement in the Visual Analogue Scale for pain and the incidence of adverse events related to the trial devices.

The multicenter randomized controlled trial plans to enroll 222 patients who are 1 to 3 months past their first stroke and have motor impairment in the affected lower limb. The experimental group will receive 4 weeks of motor imagery-based BCI-driven active and passive lower limb training, while the control group gets 4 weeks of conventional training. The primary outcome is the Fugl-Meyer Assessment Lower Extremity Section, with balance, daily living ability and walking classification as secondary outcomes. First enrolment is set for May 31, 2026.

The multicenter randomized controlled trial pits closed-loop BCI ankle training against conventional active and passive ankle training in subacute stroke patients who are 4 to 12 weeks past onset and have less than 10 degrees of active ankle dorsiflexion. Primary endpoints are active ankle dorsiflexion range of motion and Manual Muscle Testing of the ankle; secondary endpoints include Functional Ambulation Classification, the Berg Balance Scale and the Fugl-Meyer Motor Assessment of the Lower Limb. The trial plans to enroll 120 patients, 60 per arm, with first enrolment set for May 31, 2026.

The study introduces RLED, a reinforcement learning-enhanced EEG diffusion framework for adaptive data augmentation in endogenous EEG tasks such as motor imagery and emotion recognition. Reinforcement learning dynamically regulates the diffusion training process to balance temporal, spectral and category-related features. Across four datasets, the high-quality synthetic EEG signals it generated consistently improved classification performance.

A Chinese team has registered a clinical trial of a multimodal brain-computer interface system for intelligent diagnosis and treatment, aimed at early screening and non-invasive modulation of Alzheimer's disease. The entry, ChiCTR2600125240, was filed with the Chinese Clinical Trial Registry on May 22, 2026 and is carried by the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform; recruitment has not begun.

The trial tests whether a steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) brain-computer interface can drive functional electrical stimulation of swallowing muscles more effectively than conventional neuromuscular electrical stimulation. It plans to enroll 90 patients, 45 per arm, all within 6 months of a first ischemic or hemorrhagic stroke and aged 18 to 80. The primary outcome is the Standard Swallowing Assessment, with secondary measures including the Functional Oral Intake Scale and the Penetration-Aspiration Scale. First enrollment is listed for June 1, 2026.

Burning mouth syndrome produces months or years of burning oral pain with no visible lesion on examination, and treatment options are limited, leaving patients shuttling between oral medicine and psychiatry. A randomized, sham-controlled interventional trial registered by Shanghai Ninth People's Hospital, Shanghai JiaoTong University School of Medicine, will apply transcranial direct current stimulation over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex while collecting resting-state brain function and structural imaging, tracking pain, anxiety, depression, sleep and salivary flow. The trial is funded by the hospital's Brain-Computer Interface Special Research Program and registered as ChiCTR2600124987 on May 20, 2026. It plans to enroll 38 participants, 19 in the active group and 19 in the sham group, with first enrollment set for June 1, 2026; recruitment has not yet started.

Intracranial recordings from ten epilepsy patients show that neural activity during cued limb motor imagery changes with the phase of the task: low-frequency (8-30 Hz) activity was mostly suppressed during preparation and switched to activation once imagery began, while high-frequency (60-115 Hz) responses were stronger, more widely distributed, and at some contacts followed an activation-then-suppression sequence. The stereoelectroencephalography (sEEG) data indicate that responses are not uniform but shift with task stage and brain region, which the authors tie to stage-aware feature design for BCIs and to neurorehabilitation.

A trial combining tactile-feedback brain-computer interface training with motor imagery for upper-limb rehabilitation after stroke is recruiting in China. Registered with the Chinese Clinical Trial Registry as ChiCTR2600124911 on May 19, 2026 and carried by the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform, the trial record is available through the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform.

The trial split 54 stroke patients with hand impairment into three groups using kinesthetic, hybrid and visuomotor imagery to drive BCI training, with upper-limb Fugl-Meyer score as the primary endpoint. The registration record does not yet report which imagery mode worked best.

Guangdong Provincial Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine has registered a parallel-design interventional trial, ChiCTR2600124411, that plans to enroll 81 patients with unilateral upper-limb impairment after stroke in three groups of 27. Two groups receive intermittent theta-burst stimulation (iTBS) over the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex or the primary motor cortex, and one receives sham stimulation; all three undergo motor imagery BCI training. Primary outcomes are BCI decoding accuracy, the Fugl-Meyer Assessment and brain network topology. The trial was registered on May 12, 2026 and is not yet recruiting.

The trial plans to enroll 40 patients with Parkinson's disease aged 40 to 80, randomized into 2 groups: one adds brain-computer interface rehabilitation training to functional electrical stimulation, the other receives functional electrical stimulation alone. Both arms train 20 minutes per day for the upper extremities and 20 minutes per day for the lower extremities, completing 12 treatment days within 2 weeks. The primary endpoint is a motor symptom rating scale, with diffusion tensor imaging, magnetic resonance spectroscopy, resting-state fMRI, and sleep, cognitive and mood scales as secondary endpoints, testing whether adding BCI training produces measurable change beyond motor symptoms.

A trial at Xuzhou Rehabilitation Hospital Affiliated to Xuzhou Medical University paired a motor imagery brain-computer interface with modified constraint-induced movement therapy to restore upper-limb function after stroke. The hospital is a rehabilitation specialty facility affiliated with Xuzhou Medical University, and the combined approach is meant to test whether a BCI adds benefit on top of established rehabilitation training. It planned 40 participants, 20 in the combined group and 20 in the control group, with the first patient enrolled on December 24, 2025; the registry now lists the study as completed. The primary endpoint is the Fugl-Meyer Assessment for Upper Extremity, with the Wolf Motor Function Test and modified Barthel Index as secondary measures. Funding comes from the New Round of Xuzhou "Pengcheng Talent Program" — High-level Healthcare Talent Recruitment and Development Project, project number 2025TD14. No results are posted, so whether the combined approach beats constraint therapy alone remains unknown.

A trial testing a brain-computer interface (BCI) combined with transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) in patients with disorders of consciousness was registered with the Chinese Clinical Trial Registry (ChiCTR) on May 7, 2026 under the number ChiCTR2600124127, and is now recruiting. The design, sample size and sponsor are not given in the record and would have to be checked against the original registration.

A randomized, sham-controlled trial will pair a non-invasive brain-computer interface with MRI-guided multichannel temporal interference stimulation in patients whose migraines resist medication. It plans to enroll 78 people aged 18 to 65, split evenly between real and sham stimulation, with headache frequency as the primary endpoint. The registration lists only design and bibliographic fields, so device details and actual enrollment remain unknown and efficacy has yet to be read out.

Researchers assessed the feasibility of a hybrid brain-computer interface that integrates motor imagery (MI) and steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP) with robotic glove feedback for upper limb motor rehabilitation in 32 stroke patients, split into a conventional-treatment control group and an experimental group receiving 10- or 20-day BCI interventions. The experimental group showed considerable improvement in Fugl-Meyer scores over the control group, and the BCI achieved EEG classification accuracy up to 98.08% with stable operation; after longer training, accuracy rose, the laterality coefficient moved toward normal, and task-related brain connectivity strengthened. The authors say the hybrid system may overcome the limits of conventional therapy and single-modality BCIs.

The Chinese Clinical Trial Registry (ChiCTR) has logged a study of the safety and efficacy of early brain-computer interface training given after reperfusion therapy in patients with acute ischemic stroke, an attempt to pin down when in the recovery window such training should start. Registered on April 27, 2026 as ChiCTR2600123548, the trial has not begun recruiting, and design, sample size and sponsor are absent from the record carried by the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP) and must be read from the original registration.

The Chinese Clinical Trial Registry (ChiCTR) has logged a multicenter randomized controlled trial testing whether brain-computer interface-based mindfulness meditation relieves the symptoms of chronic tinnitus. Registered on April 23, 2026 as ChiCTR2600123258, the trial has not begun enrolling patients, and its design, sample size and sponsor must be read from the original registration record. It is the first multicenter registration to combine BCI with mindfulness meditation for chronic tinnitus, moving the approach from single-center exploration toward multicenter validation.

A trial registered with the Chinese Clinical Trial Registry combines low-frequency rTMS with motor imagery brain-computer interface therapy, using conventional physical rehabilitation as the control, with the Fugl-Meyer upper extremity scale as the primary endpoint. The study has three parts: Part I compares BCI therapy with conventional rehabilitation, while Part III compares three rTMS protocols. It plans to enroll 213 participants, with first enrolment set for May 1, 2026; recruitment has not yet begun.

The trial combines a brain-computer interface with robotic mirror therapy into a single intervention, while the control arm receives conventional comprehensive rehabilitation only. It enrolls patients aged 30 to 80 with unilateral upper-limb motor impairment 1 to 6 months after ischemic or hemorrhagic stroke, whose lesions are confined to the basal ganglia. The primary endpoint is the Fugl-Meyer Assessment of the Upper Extremity, with EEG, functional MRI and the Modified Ashworth Scale among secondary measures. The planned enrollment is 40 patients, with first enrollment set for May 1, 2026.

A trial of a dual-task brain-computer interface (BCI) combining motor-intention detection with virtual reality training is recruiting patients to measure how it affects shoulder function after rotator cuff repair surgery, following its registration with the Chinese Clinical Trial Registry (ChiCTR) on April 20, 2026. The record has been reposted by the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP).

A brain-computer interface (BCI) trial for upper-limb motor rehabilitation after hemorrhagic stroke was registered with the Chinese Clinical Trial Registry under the number ChiCTR2600122859 on April 20, 2026, and has not yet begun recruiting. The study combines electroencephalography (EEG) with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). The registration record does not disclose the study design, sample size or sponsor.

A Nature Communications study tested ultra-Flexible Implantable Neural Electrode arrays during awake surgery in 16 patients. Valid single-unit recordings were obtained in 11 patients, yielding 719 isolated neurons and as many as 135 simultaneously, while five early cases failed because of operating-room noise or damaged insertion needles. The work was intraoperative and does not establish long-term implant performance.

A trial registered in China pairs brain-computer interface technology with mindfulness meditation training for adolescents with depression, recording EEG alongside the sessions to see how brain activity changes. The question is whether real-time brain signals can be read during meditation and fed back into the training, making the intervention more responsive to each participant's state. Recruitment has not yet started, and the design, sample size and sponsor have not been disclosed.

Researchers at Xidian University built DisCo-Former, a Transformer framework for single-trial rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) EEG decoding with three components guided by neurophysiological priors, then found its attention consistently collapsed: attention maps went nearly uniform and value-projection weights shrank toward 0. Stripping out the Transformer encoder left DisCo-MLP, a pure multilayer perceptron that matched or beat the Transformer version across two datasets and three evaluation regimes, with within-subject mean AUCs of about 0.94 to 0.98. For RSVP-EEG, the authors argue, modeling the signal's structure matters more than architectural complexity. The study was published in the International Journal of Neural Systems on April 10, 2026.

A randomized controlled trial of motor-imagery brain-computer interface (BCI) training for swallowing difficulty after stroke was registered with the Chinese Clinical Trial Registry (ChiCTR) on April 9, 2026, under the number ChiCTR2600122162. It will test whether the training improves swallowing function in stroke patients, and has not yet begun recruiting.

People's Daily Online reported that BrainCo completed an RMB 2 billion Series B+ round in January 2026, the largest single BCI financing in China at the time. The report did not disclose the lead investor, a complete investor list or the post-money valuation. The round indicates a capital-intensive expansion phase across BrainCo's non-invasive and medical product lines.

To reduce negative transfer in motor imagery BCIs, the study presents an adaptive dynamic transfer learning framework that decomposes EEG time-frequency features via wavelet convolution, matches source and target samples through a dynamic transfer attention module, and uses a joint loss to shrink marginal and class-conditional differences. On BNCI2014001, BNCI2014002 and BNCI2015001 it reached 78.78%, 82.11% and 78.19% accuracy, averaging 0.13% to 27.7% above baseline algorithms.

On 31 March 2026 Hubei's provincial science and technology department approved the formation of a provincial brain-computer interface technology innovation centre, led by Tongji Hospital in Wuhan together with 12 organisations including Huazhong University of Science and Technology and Hubei Optics Valley Laboratory. Chinese reports describe it as the country's first provincial BCI platform positioned as comprehensive and full-chain. Its stated priorities are neural signal decoding, domestic sourcing of core components, and refining both non-invasive and implanted approaches. It is headed by Tang Zhouping, the hospital's party secretary.