100 days after having a Neuralink implant installed, the first patient in the program testifies to the improvements in his life.
On January 28, Neuralink, the company founded by Elon Musk, announced that it had successfully placed a brain implant on a man, Nolan Arbaugh. Since then, the patient’s progress has been revealed, and he has, for example, been able to manipulate a mouse with his mind, then play chess, and finally Mario Kart against a Neuralink staff member.
Restoring the autonomy of disabled people
It has now been 100 days since the implantation took place, and according to the American company, “the operation went extremely well”, to the point of now offering the testimony of the participant in the study authorized since beginning of the year by health authorities.
“You’re giving me too much, it’s like luxury overload, I haven’t been able to do these things for 8 years, and now I don’t even know where to start and where to allocate my attention,” explains Noland Arbaugh.
He explains that he can now lie on his bed and use his implant without any assistance, whereas until now he had to ask for assistance to even sit up. “It allows me to live at my own pace, without needing someone to help me throughout the day,” he continues.
More generally, for Noland Arbaugh, Neuralink allowed him to “reconnect with the world” including those close to him: “it allowed me to do things on my own again,” he explains, specifying that he no longer has needs his family at all hours of the day and night.
But placing the implant was only the first step since the patient now collaborates with the researchers up to 35 hours per week. The rest of the time, he uses the implant for “personal use,” the company reveals. The data collected in this way makes it possible to evaluate the performance of the implant. This made it possible, for example, to note that in the weeks following the operation, “a certain number of wires retracted in the brain, leading to a clear reduction in the number of effective electrodes”. To compensate, the algorithm was therefore modified so that it was more sensitive to certain signals.
Among the future objectives, Neuralink specifies that it wants to significantly improve the response time between the human and the machine so that it is similar to that of an able-bodied human. In addition, the implant could soon be compatible with robotic arms and wheelchairs with the aim of making disabled people less dependent.
