Image: © Mojahid Mottakin/Stock.adobe.com
The 29-year-old patient said the Telepathy implant is not perfect, but that it has already changed his life and allowed him to play games again.
Neuralink has provided a glimpse into the human trials of its brain-implant device, as the company showed its first patient using the device to perform tasks on a computer using his thoughts.
The company shared a video of a Neuralink engineer with Noland Arbaugh, a 29-year-old man who became paralysed below the shoulders eight years ago after a diving accident.
Arbaugh appears to be the first human to be implanted with a Neuralink device – the operation occurred in January based on a post from Elon Musk. The company’s first brain-implant product is called Telepathy and aims to lets users control their phone or computer “and through them almost any device” with thought alone.
The video shows Arbaugh playing chess on a computer without the use of his limbs – using the Telepathy interface to move a mouse cursor on the screen with his mind.
“I love playing chess and this is one of the things you all have enabled me to do, something that I wasn’t able to really do much the last few years, especially not like this,” Arbaugh said.
The video also shows Arbaugh turning off music playing on a device using his thoughts. Arbaugh said that he had used the brain implant to play the video game Civilization VI, something he couldn’t do after his accident. He said the device gave him “the ability to do that again and played for eight hours straight”.
Arbaugh expressed various positive ways that Telepathy has helped him achieve more independence and do some of his hobbies again, but he also said the new technology is not perfect and they “have run into some issues”.
“I don’t want people to think this is the end of the journey, there is still work to be done,” Arbaugh said. “But it has already changed my life.”
A controversial journey
Neuralink received approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last year to run clinical trials on humans, in the form of an investigational device exemption. This allows devices to be used in a clinical study in order to collect “safety and effectiveness data”.
The company has trialled the technology with pigs and monkeys over the years, with one monkey making headlines when it was shown playing the classic video game Pong with its mind via two N1 Link chips embedded in its brain.
But like many companies associated with Musk, Neuralink has been hit with controversy in the past. The company faced federal investigation in the US for potential animal welfare violations during its trials.
A Wired report in September 2023 revealed there were calls from a medical ethics group to investigate Musk’s claims about monkeys that died during company trials. Musk said the monkeys did not die as a result of the Neuralink implants but company records indicate the animals may have suffered and died as a result of the company’s testing.
Find out how emerging tech trends are transforming tomorrow with our new podcast, Future Human: The Series. Listen now on Spotify, on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.
