Wireless Implants

Shanghai-based StairMed has taken its wireless implantable brain-computer interface system into human evaluation for people with speech impairments. The prospective, single-arm trial (NCT07647315) actually began on September 1, 2026, is now recruiting, and plans to enroll 4 participants. Subjects will undergo surgical implantation and brain-control training, followed by an expected 12 months of follow-up recording adverse events, serious adverse events and device deficiencies, along with efficacy data on brain-controlled interaction and communication. Primary completion is expected on August 30, 2028, and the study as a whole on December 30, 2028. The registry record does not disclose the implant site, decoding method or detailed eligibility criteria, and no interim results have been posted, so conclusions on safety and efficacy will have to wait for follow-up data.

To move from lab prototypes to long-term clinical systems, implantable brain-computer interfaces must place thousands to millions of electrodes several millimeters to centimeters deep in brain tissue without heating it by more than about 1 degree Celsius. This review benchmarks inductive, mid-field, RF, ultrasonic, magnetoelectric, optical, UWB and electro-quasistatic wireless links against three clinical axes (depth, size and data rate), noting that almost every clinically relevant implant is weakly coupled, with coupling coefficients of only 10^-3 to 10^-1. Within a communication budget of about 10 mW, narrowband high-Q links suit power transfer and low-speed data, but at 1-10 nJ/b they cannot deliver the more than 10 Mbps to tens of Gbps uplinks that interfaces with a thousand or more channels require. The study is a preprint and has not been peer reviewed.

BCIFlex Medical Technology has begun a clinical trial in China evaluating the safety and efficacy of an implantable wireless brain-computer interface in patients left tetraplegic by spinal cord injury. The trial is registered on ClinicalTrials.gov as NCT07784088 and is recruiting. The sponsor is a Chinese device maker headquartered in the Haidian district of Beijing with an office in Shanghai, working on invasive ultra-thin flexible electrodes; its products include digital EEG systems and stereo-EEG depth electrodes.

A preprint uses radio-frequency backscatter and near-field wireless charging to tackle the wireless-link and power constraints of implantable brain-machine interfaces, noting that while high-resolution microelectrode arrays enable precise brain readout and stimulation, the 32–128 Mbps links they need are too power-hungry for a long-lived implanted battery. The approach strips the transceiver electronics out of the implant, moving complexity to the external reader to cut implant power, and powers the neural recording and stimulation chips via magnetic coupling. Preliminary tests validate the feasibility of the design; the study has not been peer reviewed.

NeuroXess registered a prospective, multicenter, single-arm trial (NCT07720882) enrolling people with tetraplegia caused by spinal cord injury to evaluate the safety and clinical efficacy of an implantable BCI system for compensatory hand movement and upper-limb functional replacement. The study is at the registration stage with no results yet.

Researchers have built a 32-channel event-based analog front-end chip in 180 nm CMOS that encodes biosignals in two modes, pulse frequency modulation and adaptive asynchronous delta modulation. The chip retunes its output data rate in real time to the envelope of the incoming signal, giving high compression and, the authors argue, a route to wireless transmission and online processing of neural signals in brain-computer interfaces.