Invasive BCI

Kandu said its IpsiHand at-home noninvasive brain-computer interface significantly improved upper-extremity motor function in patients with chronic stroke in an NIH-funded randomized controlled trial, with more than half achieving clinically meaningful recovery. The results were published in Stroke: Vascular and Interventional Neurology.

Daniel Palanker, a Stanford professor and affiliate of the university's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, has won the U.S. Defense Health Agency's Outstanding Research Accomplishment award for the PRIMA retinal implant, designed to restore central vision after photoreceptor loss. A 2-mm chip sits beneath the retina and is driven by infrared light from augmented-reality glasses, converting that light into current that stimulates the next layer of neurons. A 2025 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that the device let legally blind patients with advanced dry age-related macular degeneration read letters and words, and the award recognizes its potential for military personnel with laser-damaged retinas.

Surgeons at Tongji Hospital in Wuhan, central China, implanted a 256-channel brain-computer interface on 3 August using electrodes 2 to 3 micrometres thick, compared with semi-invasive arrays that are millimetres thick, sit outside the dura and carry eight contacts. Eastern China's Shandong performed its own first provincial case in late July. Hubei now covers all three BCI approaches clinically.

Israel's Wearable Devices said the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has granted it a continuation patent covering user authentication that combines gesture input with biopotential sensors recording neural signals. The technology could be applied to secure payments, user detection and authorization of sensitive actions, adding a biometric layer to gesture-controlled devices.

One year after its June 2025 launch, Neuro Space (脑智天地) — Shanghai's BCI industry cluster at the Hongqiao International Medical Center and China's first dedicated BCI industrial zone — has entered full operation across its 25,000 m² pilot area. As of July 2026, the cluster hosts 52 registered BCI companies and 22 startup incubators spanning flexible electrodes, BCI chips, ultrasound-based interfaces, and vision restoration. On the commercialization front, the world's first approved invasive BCI medical device, developed in Shanghai, received regulatory clearance in 2026, with its first clinical prescription issued in July. Five additional Class III devices are currently in clinical trials or under regulatory review. Shanghai accounts for nearly 60% of China's BCI financing events, totaling approximately RMB 2.117 billion. Products showcased at a recent open-day event include a non-invasive brain-controlled consumer device driven by EEG-based attention metrics, an integrated transcranial magnetic stimulation navigation system for depression treatment, and LingXi Cloud, a clinical data platform housing over 2.1 million cases of multimodal brain-disorder data at petabyte scale.

Researchers at University Medical Center Utrecht's Brain Center in the Netherlands and collaborators exhaustively tested every rectangular subgrid inside 32-, 64- and 128-channel ECoG arrays recorded from nine people with epilepsy. Grid area could be cut by 75% to 94% without meaningful loss of hand-movement classification accuracy, as long as the remaining electrodes sat over informative cortex; below a critical area of about 60 mm², performance fell sharply. The study appeared in the journal Neuroinformatics on August 7, 2026.

A team from the University of Granada in Spain took a P300 brain-computer interface into a secondary school classroom, using a Bitbrain Versatile EEG system to identify a digit a volunteer had silently chosen, in front of nearly a hundred students. The demonstration grew out of a thesis by industrial electronic engineering student Marta Rodríguez Comino, supervised by Dr. Joaquín T. Valderrama and Dr. Iván López Espejo. The water-based portable EEG system decoded the attention signals using principal component analysis and a support vector machine.

NeuroXess announced that its self-developed implantable brain-computer interface system for hand motor function compensation — the 'fully implanted, fully wireless, fully functional' ('Sanquan') system — has passed public notice and formally entered the innovative medical device special review program of the National Medical Products Administration's Center for Medical Device Evaluation (CMDE), commonly known as the green channel. The company describes it as the first subdural implantable flexible BCI product in China to enter the program. The system began a GCP registration clinical trial at Huashan Hospital, Fudan University on July 7, 2026, run as a multicentre study across 15 Class III hospitals nationwide, with trial data intended to support a Class III medical device registration application with the NMPA. The system remains in the review and clinical-trial stage and has not yet been approved for market; the registration timeline reflects company statements and remains subject to regulatory notice.

A new study proposes a hybrid Markov chain-spatial statistical (MCSS) machine learning framework for classifying motor imagery EEG, reporting classification accuracy above 98% for every subject on BCI Competition III datasets IVa and IVb when paired with a support vector machine. Because the method discretizes signals into symbolic states and works from transition probability matrices rather than raw traces, the original neural waveforms are hard to reconstruct; the authors report that membership inference attacks stayed near chance level and that feature inversion attacks produced low reconstruction similarity.

Researchers demonstrated synchronized EEG, ECG, GSR and eye tracking during a flight-simulation experiment at a workshop held with Professor Tom Carlson at University College London. A g.Nautilus 28-channel wireless EEG headset, ECG and GSR sensors and Tobii Pro Glasses 3 captured the signals in real time, tracking mental workload, engagement and heart rate variability (HRV) across two complete flight cycles of take-off, free flight and landing. The rig can be set up in 30 minutes and leaves participants free to move throughout.