Elon Musk’s Neuralink Human Trials Faces a Glitch

Neuralink corp. was founded by Elon Musk in 2016 that develop a Brain-computer interface that can be implanted in the human brain and enable human thoughts to control a computer.

The technology of Neuralink involves an N1 intracortical BCI implant which has threads thinner than hair strands with electrodes, these electrodes can acquire signals and route them to an electrical enclosure that transmits the neural data to a Neuralink application on a computer system. These threads are implanted by R1- a surgical robot.

After receiving approval from the FDA for clinical trials in 2023, Neuralink implanted the BCI chip in a Quadriplegic person, Noland Arbaugh in January 2024. Arbaugh is a 30-year-old who went through a tragic accident 8 years ago that left him Paralysed.

Recently, it was announced through the neuralink’s blog that the Progress of the human trial was temporarily stunned, the Thread studded with electrodes sitting the cortex of the brain retracted which led to the loss of the progress Arbaugh had achieved.

However, the company resolved these issues by making a series of software modulations that remediated the retraction of these threads. Further, the company added that after fixing the setback, Arbaugh achieved accelerated progress that it was before.

In a recent interview with Good Morning America, Arbaugh revealed his optimistic outlook for the treatment of spinal cord injuries saying “I think It’s going to be amazing when someone can have a spinal cord injury, go into a hospital, get a surgery and walk out a couple of days later.”

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