Roscommon-born MND patient Eoin Egan goes public as Neuralink GB-PRIME participant, demonstrating a thought-controlled wheelchair built with German assistive tech firm Homebrace

By Inside BCI · May 31, 2026

An Irish architect with motor neurone disease drove his wheelchair around a London park with his thoughts alone, four days after a surgical robot inserted a Neuralink implant into his brain at Queen Square. Eoin Egan, 43, originally from Moore in South Roscommon, went public on 30 May 2026 as one of seven UK participants in Neuralink’s GB-PRIME early feasibility study, in an interview with the Roscommon Herald. Egan received his N1 Implant in December 2025 at UCLH’s National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, the Queen Square neurological centre that has performed all seven UK Neuralink surgeries to date. Four days post-surgery he was using the implant to steer his wheelchair through outdoor space using bespoke software built for him by German assistive technology firm Homebrace. He is the third UK GB-PRIME participant to surface publicly.

The clinical context

The GB-PRIME study is the UK arm of Neuralink’s PRIME early feasibility trial. UCLH NHS Foundation Trust confirmed on 29 January 2026 that all seven planned UK participants had received their implants in surgeries conducted between October and December 2025 at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in Queen Square. The Chief Investigator is Mr Harith Akram, UCLH consultant neurosurgeon at the NHNN and Honorary Clinical Associate Professor at UCL. The Principal Investigator is Mr William Muirhead, consultant neurosurgeon at NHNN.

Two GB-PRIME participants had already gone public before Egan. The first UK patient was Paul (October 2025), also with motor neurone disease, who was able to move a computer cursor with his thoughts the day after surgery. The second was Sebastian Gomez, a medical student who lost use of his limbs in a diving accident, who has described using the implant to control a computer and mobile phone purely through thought.

Egan’s account adds a third specific use case: thought-driven wheelchair control in real outdoor environments. The Roscommon Herald interview reports Egan completed an outdoor wheelchair run with his neurosurgeon present, who has since presented a video of the demonstration at a clinical conference. Egan is scheduled to present at another conference himself in June 2026.

The implant architecture

The N1 Implant is a fully implantable, intracortical BCI that records brain signals through over 1,000 electrodes distributed across ultra-thin polymer threads, each finer than a human hair and inserted by Neuralink’s purpose-built R1 surgical robot. The R1 robot insertion takes hours rather than the minutes of conventional electrode placement, and the implant communicates wirelessly via Bluetooth to a paired laptop. The N1 Implant and R1 Robot have been approved as investigational medical devices for the GB-PRIME study by the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the Health Research Authority (HRA) and Health and Care Research Wales (HCRW), and the London Camberwell St Giles Research Ethics Committee.

Egan’s account of the surgery describes a six-hour procedure performed by the robot. He was discharged two days post-operation. The cursor calibration on his laptop began the day after he got home and worked first time. He controls cursor position by imagining movement in his paralysed left wrist, and uses specific imagined finger movements for click commands.

The Homebrace wheelchair integration

The thought-controlled wheelchair is not part of Neuralink’s clinical protocol. It is a separate integration that Egan and his sister Ethel (a bioengineer) built informally at home, four days after his surgery, by linking eye-tracking software with the BCI signal. The German assistive technology firm Homebrace, which had previously provided Egan with eye-tracking glasses, subsequently developed bespoke software that adapts its existing eye-tracking wheelchair control architecture to receive BCI cursor input instead.

The Homebrace integration may be the first publicly reported example of a Neuralink BCI being used to drive a wheelchair in outdoor real-world conditions rather than to control a computer screen. The clinical significance is that it shows the N1 Implant’s cursor-control output stream can be redirected to non-Neuralink hardware via third-party assistive software, opening the BCI implant to a broader ecosystem of assistive-device interoperability beyond the Neuralink-branded user interface stack.

How this fits the Neuralink trial geography

Neuralink’s PRIME programme is now an active multi-country early feasibility study. The original US PRIME study has implanted participants since January 2024. Canada (CAN-PRIME at Toronto Western Hospital) and the UAE have separately announced participants. GB-PRIME completed all seven UK surgeries in a single quarter (October to December 2025), a pace materially faster than the original US PRIME enrolment timeline. The total Neuralink global participant count by Egan’s own account is in the low twenties as of his surgery in December 2025, with public reporting placing the figure higher by mid-2026.

For a Fortune 500 strategist tracking the BCI commercial inflection, the GB-PRIME completion in a single quarter is the structural signal. It demonstrates that Neuralink is operating multi-site international trials at production-pipeline pace, with the regulatory and surgical infrastructure to enrol and implant a full study cohort in months rather than years. Combined with the Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine joining the BrainGate consortium this week (Inside BCI, 29 May 2026) and ABILITY Neurotech’s IMDD approval for its UK Utrecht-anchored INTRECOM consortium (Inside BCI, 27 May 2026), the implantable BCI category is now operating with multi-site clinical infrastructure across the US, Canada, UAE, UK, EU, and China simultaneously.

What Egan is doing now

Beyond the wheelchair, Egan is using the implant to run his commercial property investment business via email and to communicate with his wife Jenny, an optometrist, and his two children Liam and Roisin. His original voice was banked shortly after his MND diagnosis in 2020 and has been reconstructed via AI voice-cloning software, allowing him to type into a screen keyboard that then renders his words in a synthetic version of his own pre-MND voice with a Roscommon accent. He has stated publicly that his longer-term ambition is exoskeleton control via the BCI to enable walking, though no such device is currently part of GB-PRIME or any other publicly disclosed Neuralink clinical roadmap.

What to watch

The first signal is whether Neuralink and UCLH publish formal interim safety and functional data from the GB-PRIME cohort. With all seven UK surgeries completed in Q4 2025, the cohort is now approaching its first six-month post-implantation milestone, which is when the original US PRIME participants began publishing meaningful long-term safety and use data. The second signal is whether the Homebrace wheelchair integration becomes a formal commercial product. Homebrace has presented at clinical conferences with Egan’s surgeon and is described as building the bespoke software directly, which suggests a near-term commercial integration is plausible. The third signal is whether Neuralink expands GB-PRIME beyond the original seven participants or files for a follow-on UK study using the N1 Implant on additional indications.

Sources

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