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Tag: research

15 articles

Research

UCSF brain-computer interface decodes speech and body gestures simultaneously from a single cortical implant

A Nature Neuroscience paper published on 14 September 2026 by Samantha C. Brosler, Jessie R. Liu, Alexander B. Silva and senior author Edward F. Chang at UCSF reports the first single-implant, single-session, real-time simultaneous decoding of speech and upper-body gestures in people with paralysis. Two of three BRAVO-trial participants (Bravo-1r, brainstem stroke, seven years enrolled; Bravo-6, ALS, implanted March 2025) controlled a personalized virtual avatar with parallel speech and gesture decoders reading from a 253-channel high-density ECoG surface array manufactured by PMT Corporation. Bravo-1r reached median 100 percent accuracy on both decoders in the real-time conversation paradigm; Bravo-6 reached 85 percent gesture and 75 percent speech. The design finding is that multimodal neural signals are not the linear sum of isolated speech and gesture signals: decoders trained on simultaneous data outperform decoders trained on isolated data, and cross-training drops opposite-modality false-positive rates from 76 percent (Bravo-1r) and 31 percent (Bravo-6) to zero. Chang has stated a fully implantable wireless successor is the next step. Hardware footprint is PMT surface ECoG plus a Blackrock Neurotech digital headstage per prior Chang-lab methods, with no overlap with Neuralink Threads, Paradromics Connexus, or Synchron Stentrode. This is the fourth UCSF Chang-lab BRAVO paper in the peer-reviewed communication-BCI sequence: Moses NEJM 2021, Metzger Nature 2023, Littlejohn Nature Neuroscience 2025, Brosler Nature Neuroscience 2026.

Sep 18

Research

DARPA's Firefox programme wants a 100-channel non-invasive brain-computer interface

DARPA has opened its Firefox programme, run out of the Biological Technologies Office by program manager Dr Pedro Irazoqui, targeting a coherent-optical non-invasive brain-computer interface at 100 channels with 50-micron spatial and 100-microsecond temporal resolution. The stated goal is to replace surgically implanted electrodes. Proposers Day is 1 September 2026, registration closes 21 August. Firefox appears to follow directly from the coherent-optical track first funded under DARPA's N3 program at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in 2019.

Aug 20

Research

DARPA is funding non-invasive neuroplasticity technology

DARPA's Defense Sciences Office has posted Special Notice DARPA-SN-26-111 for its forthcoming SHINE (Selective Harnessing of Intrinsic Neuroplasticity Engineering) Disruption Opportunity, with a prerecorded Information Session webcast on 25 August 2026 and the DO release anticipated the same month. Program manager is Robin Bonomi. SHINE aims to non-invasively induce adaptive neuroplasticity in targeted dysfunctional neural circuits for injury recovery, spanning five modality domains. Awards will be Other Transactions for prototype projects. Registration closes 14 August 2026 and is unusually open to foreign nationals.

Aug 11

Research

KIST reports first BCI chip that reads electrical and optical brain signals on one probe

Researchers at KIST's Brain Science Institute have published a peer-reviewed BCI probe in Advanced Science that combines 416 electrodes and 832 photodiodes across 13 hair-thin silicon shanks, enabling simultaneous electrical and optical brain-signal readout on a single monolithic CMOS chip. KIST claims it as a world-first at this level of density and integration. Preclinical work in live mice; not yet in primate or human. Funded by Korea's K-Moonshot Project.

Aug 8

Research

An Imperial-Tsinghua BCI lets ten healthy people control a pair of extra robotic arms while balancing a ball with their own hands

Tianyu Jia and Dario Farina at Imperial College London, with collaborators at Tsinghua University and Southeast University Nanjing, published a Nature Communications paper on 2 July 2026 describing a tactile-encoded non-invasive BCI in which ten healthy participants controlled four supernumerary robotic degrees of freedom concurrently with a bimanual ball-balancing task, reaching 74.79 per cent single-task and 59.69 per cent dual-task online accuracy after three days of training.

Jul 2

Research

Rockefeller researchers locate abstract thought in the ventral premotor cortex, opening a new decoding target above motor cortex for brain-computer interfaces

Researchers at Rockefeller University's Laboratory of Neural Systems published evidence in Nature that the ventral premotor cortex hosts the neural substrates of abstract symbolic thought, identifying a brain region that mediates between the higher-thinking prefrontal cortex and the action-executing motor cortex. The finding has direct implications for BCI decoding targets: implants placed at the ventral premotor cortex could potentially decode user intent at a higher level of abstraction than current motor-cortex BCIs.

May 26

Research

Chinese paraplegic patient regains partial sensation and movement one year after world-first combined Beinao-1 BCI and brain-spine interface surgery

A paraplegic patient who in May 2025 became the world's first to simultaneously receive the invasive Beinao No.1 brain-computer interface and a temporally programmed spinal cord stimulation system has improved from complete to incomplete spinal cord injury (ASIA Grade A to ASIA Grade C) after one year of staged rehabilitation, the Xuanwu Hospital Capital Medical University team disclosed on 22 May 2026.

May 24