Nearly 20 years after neuroscientist John Donoghue placed electrodes on Matthew Nagle’s motor cortex, allowing the man with no limb movement to control objects using his thoughts, the brain-computer interface field looks dramatically different — both the people doing the research and the technologies they are creating.
Researchers like Leigh Hochberg and Eddie Chang and big-name startups such as Synchron and Paradromics have turned what was not too long ago an arcane academic interest into a cultural phenomenon. Elon Musk, in particular, has stoked public interest in the technology with avowals that Neuralink’s technology will eventually allow humans to download their brains into robots.
The concurrent rise in artificial intelligence, including large language models and generative AI like ChatGPT, has been integral to these technological advances over the last two decades. Experts suggest the field is several years away from putting a viable product on the market, whether it restores movement or sensation or facilitates communication with a computer. But early studies have dramatically advanced medicine’s understanding of the brain and generated significant interest from potential stakeholders.
Now that several teams have demonstrated the safety of their devices, the field is poised to leap from the lab to the real world. Next researchers must prove that their devices can function outside tightly controlled laboratory conditions and improve the quality of life for people with paralysis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or other disabilities. Right on cue, the Food and Drug Administration recently held a workshop to help researchers turn successful feasibility studies into clinically significant devices.
As the field shifts, a new crop of researchers are building on the work of luminaries such as Donoghue, Hochberg and Chang. Among them are these six researchers whose work is shaping this rapidly evolving field. While this snapshot of the field does not include startups jockeying for money and talent, it does showcase scientists leading the work of harnessing neural activity to improve the quality of life for people with disabilities.
Sergey Stavisky
Co-director, University of California, Davis Neuroprosthetics Lab
Sergey Stavisky is building a speech decoder, a device that helps people communicate after they lose the ability to talk. A recent trial of this BCI gave a man with ALS the ability to speak again using his own voice that researchers recreated from old recordings. Stavisky and his colleagues implanted the device into the “speechiest” part of the brain, which then collected and transformed the neural activity into text on a computer screen, which can read it aloud.
For his work on this and other studies, Stavisky received the BCI Society Early Scholar award in 2023. He is also one of the principal investigators of the BrainGate trials, a national consortium of researchers collaborating on different BCI projects.
Mariska Vansteensel
Neuroscientist, University Medical Centre Utrecht in the Netherlands
President, BCI Society
Mariska Vansteensel wants to get BCIs out of the lab and into the home. Her team chronicled an ALS patient’s use of a BCI device at home for over seven years in a recent New England Journal of Medicine study. The study revealed that BCI technology could prove fruitful for late-stage ALS patients, whose eye-gaze devices fail as eye muscle control weakens in later stages of the neurodegenerative disease.
In a recent STAT article, she explained her user-centered philosophy that neuroscientists need to account for the caretakers who will eventually be operating these BCI systems. “The field is making huge leaps at the moment. The artificial intelligence, it’s really impressive. But the pipelines securing independent home use that families and caretakers can use to maintain the system, that also needs to be set up.”
Emily Graczyk
Assistant Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Case Western School of Engineering, School of Medicine
It’s all about touch for Emily Graczyk. The neuroscientist develops technologies to stimulate the nervous system that can augment or restore sensations like temperature, touch and pain for people with spinal cord injuries. Her work investigates the intricacies and nuances of sensory magnitude, such as the neural difference between a firm and a bone-crushing handshake or restoring sensation to breast cancer patients after reconstructive surgery.
She is also working on a bidirectional BCI, in which a scientist can both stimulate the nervous system and collect neural activity data.
Abbey Sawyer
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Abilities Research Center, Mount Sinai Health System
One expert called Abbey Sawyer’s work “possibly some of the most significant in the field.” Experts have long discussed the need for standardized clinical outcome measures for implanted BCI technology that are both meaningful to patients and to insurers. Sawyer is leading this charge. The former physiotherapist has been building scientific consensus so the field can transition from research phase to market phase.
Inspired by her grandfather’s struggle with multiple sclerosis when she was young, Sawyer believes that the integration of BCIs with digital devices can dramatically improve the quality of life for people with tetraplegia and quadriplegia.
Frank Willett
Research Scientist, Neural Prosthetics Translational Laboratory, Stanford University
Similar to Sergey Stavisky, Frank Willett seeks to turn brain activity into speech. Unlike Stavisky, however, the neuroscientist has built devices that translate brain activity of imagined handwriting into speech. And more recently, Willett worked on a team that saw a big improvement in the words per minute produced using a device implanted into the region associated with the articulation of speech.
These studies augur a shift away from thought-to-text BCI tools in which subjects look at a computer and mentally click on letters on the screen. Improving upon this “point and click” method will improve how quickly patients with paralysis can communicate. This lines up with Willett’s ultimate goal: give these people more agency and help them speak again. For his role in these and other studies, Willett was awarded the BCI Society Early Scholar award in 2021.
Eli Kinney-Lang
Professor, Inclusive Engineering Technologies for Neurodevelopment, University of Calgary; Engineering Core Director, BCI4Kids
Eli Kinney-Lang is targeting a different population with his brain-computer interfaces than the other members of this list: kids. Current research ignores kids as possible brain-computer interface users, even though research shows they can operate BCIs at the same level as adults. Kinney-Lang recognizes the challenges in trying to adapt decades of research in adults for this new population, but he believes brain-computer interface technology could dramatically improve the quality of life for millions of kids with physical disabilities, helping them move and communicate.
While the Calgary resident and his colleagues have only used commercially available non-implantable BCIs in their studies, they have plans to grow their modest reach. Kinney-Lang is also the co-founder of BCI Games and Possibility Neurotechnologies — two attempts to gamify and make BCIs more accessible.
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