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Neuralink, the Elon Musk startup that hopes to link our brains directly to computers, showed progress Wednesday in two medical areas: helping blind people to see and helping people with spinal cord injuries to walk.
The company, one of five that Musk leads, is working on technology to drop thousands of electrodes thinner than a hair into the outer surface of human brains. Each electrode is a tiny wire connected to a battery powered, remotely recharged, quarter sized chip package that's embedded into a spot that once held a circle of skull. The chip, called the N1, communicates wirelessly with the outside world.
The technology is still far from the initial medical uses, much less Musk's ultimate vision of using Neuralink to hang out with superintelligent AIs. But it's making significant progress, including applying with the Food and Drug Administration to begin human trials it hopes to start within 6 months, the company said at a "show and tell" event lasting more than two hours.
"Our goal will be to turn the lights on for someone who's spent decades living in the dark," said Neuralink researcher Dan Adams, who's working on the effort to repackage camera data into a brain-compatible format and pipe it directly to the visual cortex.
www.cnet.com
The company, one of five that Musk leads, is working on technology to drop thousands of electrodes thinner than a hair into the outer surface of human brains. Each electrode is a tiny wire connected to a battery powered, remotely recharged, quarter sized chip package that's embedded into a spot that once held a circle of skull. The chip, called the N1, communicates wirelessly with the outside world.
The technology is still far from the initial medical uses, much less Musk's ultimate vision of using Neuralink to hang out with superintelligent AIs. But it's making significant progress, including applying with the Food and Drug Administration to begin human trials it hopes to start within 6 months, the company said at a "show and tell" event lasting more than two hours.
"Our goal will be to turn the lights on for someone who's spent decades living in the dark," said Neuralink researcher Dan Adams, who's working on the effort to repackage camera data into a brain-compatible format and pipe it directly to the visual cortex.
Neuralink's Upgraded Brain Chip Hopes to Help the Blind See and the Paralyzed Walk
The latest version of the company's N1 chip is intended to be implanted in brains and spines.
www.cnet.com
