The tiny wires of Neuralink’s brain chip implant, used on the first participant in a trial run by Elon Musk’s company, have proven “more or less very stable,” a company executive said Wednesday.
The company reported in May that several small wires in the brain of Noland Arbaugh, who is paralyzed from the shoulders down following a 2016 diving accident, had dislocated.
“After you do brain surgery, it takes a while for the tissue to develop and the wires to anchor in place. Once that happens, everything is stable,” said Dongjin “DJ” Seo, director of Neuralink.
So far, Arbaugh, who lives in Arizona, has been the only patient to receive the implant, but Musk hopes to add more than a dozen patients this year.
The company is now taking risk-mitigating measures, such as skull modeling and returning carbon dioxide concentrations in patients’ blood to normal levels, company executives said in a livestream on social media platform X.
“For future implants, our plan is to very deliberately sculpt the surface of the skull so that the gap under the implant is as small as possible, bringing it closer to the brain and taking some of the tension off the wires,” said Matthew MacDougall, chief neurosurgeon at Neuralink.
Neuralink is testing its implant to give paralyzed patients the ability to use digital devices by thinking alone. The device works by using tiny wires, thinner than a human hair, to pick up signals from the brain and translate them into actions such as moving a mouse cursor on a computer screen.
Musk said during the livestream that the device does not harm the brain. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration raised safety concerns when it first considered the device years ago, but eventually gave the company the green light to begin human trials last year.
So far, the device has allowed Arbaugh to play video games, surf the Internet and move a cursor on his laptop just by thinking, according to the company’s blog posts and videos.
Neuralink is also working on a new device that the company says will require half the number of electrodes in the brain to make it more efficient and powerful, executives said.
© Thomson Reuters 2024
