Industry News

Muse announced Brain Age, a feature combining headband-recorded EEG with four one-time cognitive tests. It will show whether estimated brain age is younger than, aligned with, or older than chronological age, expressed as a difference in years. According to the company, the first reading requires 10 qualifying minutes on each of 7 different days and completion of all four tests, with updates every Monday thereafter. The feature supports Muse 2, Muse S, and Muse S Athena. The first reading is free; subsequent readings require Muse Premium. Muse describes it as a general wellness feature whose readings are not for medical use; the company does not promise that practice changes brain age.

WABO won first prize in the startup group of the 2026 Global Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Entrepreneurship Contest for its project to build a human neural intent model. According to the company, the contest was organized by the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence and received 340 applications. Twenty teams reached the final, with ten each in the startup and growth groups and one first prize per group. WABO is developing a model that combines EEG, EMG, and task context to interpret high-level human intent under specific task conditions and connect it to intelligent-device actions. The award reflects the contest's project evaluation, not validation of intent recognition or device-control performance.

Ten drivers wore EEG, heart rate variability, skin response and eye tracking gear through 6 conditions, from low-speed off-road driving to track laps in a McLaren. The strongest flow-state signature — elevated frontal-midline theta with preserved alpha — appeared on the track; the high-speed passenger ride instead showed falling theta and alpha with rising beta, a pattern the team read as anxiety rather than thrill. Karting produced clearer signs of engaged, positive arousal than the passenger ride despite lower speeds. The team says the recordings show that EEG good enough to separate engagement from stress can be collected in a moving vehicle.

Neurotechnology has released BrainAccess Mobile, a free Android app (Android 7 and later) that brings the core functions of its desktop software BrainAccess Board to phones and tablets. The app connects to one or more BrainAccess EEG devices over Bluetooth and handles device setup, signal acquisition, real-time viewing, electrode impedance checks, playback and data management, with data stored locally or streamed to a computer via the LSL protocol. The company says it suits outdoor state monitoring, synchronized multi-person recording and home sleep studies, but is not yet suited to experiments that require precise stimulus-response alignment, such as event-related potential and P300 paradigms, for which it still recommends a computer. The existing BrainAccess Mobile Lite will remain free.

About one-third of people with epilepsy keep having seizures despite medication, which remains first-line treatment. Over two decades, neuromodulation has grown from vagus nerve stimulation alone into several technical routes, and the FDA has approved three implantable therapies: LivaNova's VNS (1997), NeuroPace's RNS System (2013) and Medtronic's deep brain stimulation of the anterior thalamic nucleus (2018). Only RNS reads brain signals, continuously monitoring intracranial EEG and stimulating when it detects abnormal patterns. Newer devices are trying to add sensing and closed-loop algorithms while avoiding craniotomy, placing electrodes under the scalp or outside the skull. Most systems from companies including PRECISIS, Adraxe, Synergia Medical and iVEAcare remain in early studies with small published samples, and PRECISIS's planned pivotal trial of about 200 patients has yet to report.

WABO demonstrated Dreamer (Lingmeng), an experience that uses EEG signals to help condition AI image generation. Visitors wore a headband, viewed EEG feedback, and took part in generating images. According to the company, the system processes and analyzes recorded EEG signals, then uses the analysis results as conditions for image generation. This is not a direct reconstruction of pictures in a participant's mind. At Qualcomm's booth during the China Unicom Partner Conference, staff guided visitors through fitting the device and using the experience. The EEG display and generated artwork showed signal acquisition and creative output as two visible stages of the public product demonstration.

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.

Science has appointed Nevada Sanchez as Executive Vice President of Engineering to lead its engineering organizations. According to the company, Sanchez co-founded Butterfly Network and served as Senior Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer, with experience taking medical imaging technology from prototype to product deployment. The appointment comes as Science begins the European commercial launch of PRIMA, its brain-computer interface retinal implant. The company also says it is accelerating its Biohybrid neural interface and Vessel perfusion programs while expanding Science Foundry's microelectromechanical systems fabrication capabilities.

BrainAccess released a major update to its desktop application BrainAccess Board on July 27, 2026, featuring a rebuilt interface, improved functionality and a new AI assistant called Jena that monitors device and signal quality in real time. The company, which supplies EEG devices and software for neuroscience research and clinical use, said the update is aimed at ease of use and data management during EEG acquisition and analysis.

Zander Labs and Encord are piloting the collection of first-person video alongside workers’ EEG to build robot-training data. Encord plans to test an initial dataset on customer models before deciding whether to scale collection.

BrainAccess, the EEG system line from Neurotechnology, has released a MATLAB API that lets users connect its wireless dry-electrode headsets over Bluetooth, configure channels and sampling rate, start and stop data streams and pull data straight into MATLAB arrays, work that previously required Python, C or the LSL MATLAB toolbox. The toolbox installs as a single .mltbx package for desktop MATLAB R2025b or newer, mirrors the structure of the existing Python API and supports session annotations and saving directly to .mat files, so recordings can go straight into tools such as Signal Processing Toolbox and EEGLAB. BrainAccess devices, sold in MINI, MIDI, MAXI and HALO models, are widely used in neuroscience research and engineering.

MEG systems maker MEGIN says it has opened a side-by-side dual-MEG hyperscanning facility at Tsinghua University in Beijing, built with the Department of Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering at Aalto University. Two MEGIN TRIUX neo systems sit in adjacent magnetically shielded rooms, which the company says allows simultaneous whole-head recording from two interacting participants with millisecond-level synchronization, opening a real-time window on how two brains interact during natural conversation, cooperation and play. MEGIN says the first scientific work from the facility will be presented at the BIOMAG 2026 conference in Beijing, running August 23 to 25, 2026; the announcement does not disclose what the facility cost, how long it took to build, or which research projects are already under way.