United States

A participant with severe upper-limb paralysis caused by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) wore an endovascular stent-electrode array and a scalp EEG cap at the same time, in the same session, while attempting ankle flexion and extension. Both recordings changed markedly during attempted movement, but the stent array showed stronger per-channel motor modulation and was unaffected by skull attenuation. Scalp EEG was more susceptible to eye blinks and jaw-muscle activity, while the stent array picked up prominent cardiac signals. Neither method reliably distinguished left from right ankle movement, leaving spatial localization an open problem.

A brain-computer interface can read neural activity tied to movement, while a powered exoskeleton supplies the force needed to carry it out. But EEG is noisy, muscle signals shift with fatigue and recovery, and the right level of assistance depends heavily on the user and the task, so AI's main value lies in handling several changing signals at once rather than relying on a single fixed input. The review surveys how EEG, EMG and mechanical sensing are combined for exoskeleton control and contrasts two applications with very different goals: stroke rehabilitation and healthy users. The author argues that higher classification accuracy alone is not enough, since latency, calibration, fatigue, uncertainty and physical safety also determine whether a system is truly usable.

During removal of a right parafalcine meningioma, surgeons placed four Layer 7 μECoG arrays, 4,096 electrodes in total, on either side of the central sulcus and recorded somatosensory evoked potentials under 5 contralateral stimulation conditions. Using a 2 MΩ impedance cutoff, 3,739 channels were usable, a 91.3% yield; phase-reversal latencies were 19, 21, 25, 26 and 25 ms, consistent with the standard intraoperative mapping performed in the same operation. The researchers caution that the setup provides dense spatial sampling rather than submillimeter physiological resolution: measured responses were correlated across roughly 3–4 mm of cortex.

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), a public research university known for its neuroscience work, had two Parkinson's disease patients train at home with a brain-computer interface (BCI) airplane-simulator game, learning to down-regulate cortical beta activity and thereby control the intensity of their own deep brain stimulation (DBS). The work, posted as a preprint on medRxiv on August 17, 2026, points to BCI applications in neuromodulation and to more personalized treatment for Parkinson's and other conditions; its conclusions have not yet been peer reviewed.

Pascall Systems, Inc. received U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 510(k) clearance for its Pascall Sensor Unit (PSU1) on August 19, 2026, with the agency finding the device substantially equivalent. The device is a Class II medical device under regulation number 882.1400, classification name Non-Normalizing Quantitative Electroencephalograph Software.

Chronic stroke patients who used an at-home brain-computer interface (BCI) therapy system gained a mean 6.0 points on the Upper Extremity Fugl-Meyer Assessment after 12 weeks, versus 1.5 points for those on a home exercise program. Response rates were 55.5% and 9.6%, for a number needed to treat of 2.2. The trial also exposed the dropout problem in home-based studies: 17 of 42 control participants withdrew because they were dissatisfied with their group assignment.

On May 8, 2026, Apple notified the European Commission under Article 14 of the Digital Markets Act that it would, through a subsidiary, acquire certain assets of Sonera and offer jobs to and hire certain Sonera employees. The deal value was not disclosed and neither party has announced it; May 8 is the filing date, and no closing date has been made public. The Commission describes Sonera as a company developing chip-scale magnetic sensors. Founded in 2018 in Berkeley, California, as a University of California, Berkeley spinout, Sonera builds acoustically driven ferromagnetic resonance magnetic sensors that operate at room temperature and has raised about $20 million.

A wireless implantable neural interface, the Brain Interchange (BIC), paired with artifact-removal algorithms captured about 82% of the high-frequency oscillations (HFOs) that a clinical-grade amplifier detected across 24-hour intracranial EEG recordings in 10 patients with drug-resistant epilepsy, according to a preprint. Using those HFOs, the system localized the seizure onset zone with 84% sensitivity and 90% specificity, comparable to clinical equipment. The authors present the work as a translational framework for chronic tracking of epileptogenic networks and for future biomarker-guided adaptive neuromodulation.

A team in France and the United States has released NETBCI, a longitudinal multimodal dataset pairing magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG) from 19 healthy subjects across 4 sessions performed on 4 different days, built to study how brain networks reorganize during brain-computer interface training. Controlling a BCI remains a learned skill that a non-negligible proportion of users never acquire even after several sessions, the authors write, and the causes of that inter-individual variability remain an open question. Each session comprises 2 eyes-open resting-state recordings of 3 minutes each plus 6 runs in which participants either sustained right-hand motor imagery or stayed at rest to control the position of a virtual cursor, and the release also includes anonymized MRI scans and behavioral scores; the authors say they hope the sample size and range of modalities will support analyses beyond brain network reorganization.

A team from the University of Utah, Kangwon National University and the University of Georgia describes a silicon-free route to neural microelectrode arrays: soft polymeric 3D microneedles are printed by two-photon polymerization, then turned into electrodes by injecting liquid gallium into the hollow channels. A newly defined retention number predicts whether the gallium stays put under physiological conditions. Coating the surface with gold nanoparticles and PEDOT doped with tetrafluoroborate cut impedance by roughly 3 orders of magnitude, and in vivo recordings in an invertebrate model captured neural spikes with no gallium leakage. The study was published in ACS Sensors on August 31, 2026.

Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have built ERP-XTTN, a cross-attention model that classifies event-related potentials (ERPs) in users it has never seen, with no per-user calibration. Across three public datasets and eight ERP components, it trailed the best baseline by 0.025 AUROC on average using only three channels. The work appeared in the Journal of Neural Engineering.

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.

Thirty-eight typically developing children aged 8 to 12 used a design application to build their own picture-based interface for a P300 brain-computer interface augmentative and alternative communication (P300-BCI-AAC) system, in a study of what children themselves want from such interfaces. They consistently chose preferred colors, animation — zooming most of all — and sound cues: animation aided visual accessibility and target location, background color changes carried preferred colors into the display, and video GIFs and picture overlays added personal relevance. The authors call motion, color, personalization and visual clarity preliminary priorities for pediatric BCI-AAC design, and point to follow-up work with children who use AAC daily and with people who have motor difficulties.

A review published on August 20, 2026 in npj Biomedical Innovations proposes brain-inspired brain-computer interfaces (BI-BCIs), a framework that unifies neuromorphic computing with BCI design to make neurotechnology lower-power, smaller and capable of closed-loop operation. The authors, from Aarhus University, Stanford University, the University of Southern Denmark, the University of Genoa, Forschungszentrum Jülich and RWTH Aachen University, say the approach could advance neuroprosthetics and neuromodulation for neurological disorders.

A Stanford program is recording brain activity in psychiatric inpatients at millisecond precision, combining noninvasive electrode arrays with deep brain recording electrodes to trace the circuits behind schizoaffective disorder, borderline personality disorder, autism and cancer-induced depression. The Human Neural Circuitry program, led by neuroscientist Karl Deisseroth at the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, has run for three years and moves data over fiber-optic and copper links fast enough for round trips of under half a millisecond, allowing the system to sense and respond in a closed loop. Deisseroth said the key innovation is getting results at millisecond precision, which he called a crucial step toward understanding complex psychiatric symptoms.

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 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.

SpikeGadgets says its hardware, using low-latency Ethernet and the TrodesNetwork API, lets researchers detect a neural activity pattern and trigger a perturbation within milliseconds. Two UCSF studies show it in use: one continuously decoded hippocampal population activity in rats to run a neurofeedback system, training the animals to volitionally generate specific memory representations for reward; the other triggered theta-phase-specific optogenetic stimulation in real time and showed that theta rhythm and replay are mechanistically separable.

Intracortical recordings from 3 BrainGate2 participants show preparatory motor cortex activity encodes movement direction, curvature, and distance, enabling preparatory-activity-based online cursor control.