Elon Musk's Neuralink Accepting Second Implantee, with Challenges and Progress

TapTechNews on May 19th, Elon Musk recently announced that the brain-computer interface company Neuralink is accepting applications for the second implantee, and this trial can achieve mental control of mobile phones and computers.

TapTechNews noticed that Neuralink announced last year that it would recruit the first batch of participants in human clinical trials, and the target group is patients with quadriplegia caused by cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Patients implanted with the Neuralink device will be able to control computers and mobile phones with just their minds, and Neuralink's first product is thus vividly named Telepathy.

In March of this year, Neuralink live-streamed the current situation of its first brain-computer chip implanted subject, Noland Arbaugh, and said that this quadriplegic man has been able to play games through his mind, such as Civilization and chess.

In the live stream, he described how he learned to use the brain-computer, I would try to move my right hand, left, right, forward, backward, and then, from there, imagine the cursor moving. He also added that he felt lucky to be Neuralink's first tester: I can't even describe how cool it is to be able to do this.

According to the agreement between Noland and Neuralink, he will provide data to the company within 1 year after the implantation of the device, and then they will discuss whether to deactivate or remove the device in the next step.

However, not long ago (May 9th), Neuralink wrote in a blog post that the device implanted for the first human patient had a mechanical failure, which is a setback for the company. Fortunately, they compensated for this problem through a series of software repair measures, resulting in rapid and continuous improvement, and now it has exceeded Noland's initial performance.

Regarding this, Eric Leuthardt, a neurosurgeon at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis who is engaged in brain implant research, said that what engineers and scientists didn't realize is how much the brain moves in the intracranial space, and just nodding or suddenly moving the head will cause a disturbance of several millimeters. Another potential problem is that since the animal's brain is smaller, the electrodes will not move as much as in the human body. Although Neuralink has conducted extensive tests on animals, it is ultimately different from human experiments.