China could overtake the U.S. in brain computer interface (BCI) technology leadership in the coming months/years, thanks to a fortunate mix of government support and investor enthusiasm. In a recent interview with the Financial Times (FT), Tiger Tao, the founder of Shanghai-based NeuroXess, highlighted the rapid progress of the firm’s BCI technology. NeuroXess (no relation to Intel XeSS) was set up in 2021 and has already reported some successful human BCI trials.
The FT report comes less than six months after we covered news of China’s plans to outpace Neuralink with a state-backed BCI blitz, to coin a phrase.
At that time, a sweeping government policy document came into effect, with a fast, aggressive roadmap. It sought to coordinate and combine China’s huge resources and oil the wheels of progress by streamlining planning, regulatory approval, and financing. At the time of writing, there have already been 10 invasive BCI trial programs in China. The hope was/is to produce two to three ‘world-class’ BCI companies by 2030, and it looks like NeuroXess could be one of them.
As for NeuroXess’ success, it seems to have been rapid. As mentioned in the intro, it was only founded in 2021. Now just half a decade old, it has recently boasted of using its BCI tech to allow a paralyzed patient to control a computer cursor. Moreover, the patient was using their BCI for computing tasks just five days after the implant operation.
NeuroXess technology
NeuroXess trials have been using invasive BCI tech, and partly because of this, the focus has been on areas of strong medical need – like patients with paralysis or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). No one without a strong medical need would be interested in a brain operation, and such a device being implanted.
The NeuroXess BCI uses a polyimide and metal mesh, but it sits on the patient’s brain and doesn’t pierce any brain tissue. This contrasts with Elon Musk’s Neuralink, which uses an implant bristling with microscopic threads to capture neural signals from within the brain. There have been concerns about electrodes going into brain tissue, causing scarring and thus the degradation of brain signal readings over time. Neuralink denies this is an issue, with its super-thin electrodes, butNeuroXess sidesteps the issue altogether.
Comparing Neuralink and NeuroXess in performance terms, the latest performance data shared by the FT suggests the former has achieved brain links at 10 bps in trials, and the Chinese tech is capable of 5.2 bps. You can see the NeuroXess speeds confirmed in the video linked in the intro.
While the race for the best invasive implant BCI continues, a BCI expert that the FT talked to noted that firms are using the latest knowledge from this frontier to the benefit of non-invasive systems. It is hoped that the advances could eventually improve non-invasive BCIs so much that operations/implants become minor or unnecessary, in general.
This optimization work is expected to be easier in China, with a virtuous circle coming into play: more data, lower costs, resulting in more users, and more data.
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