The branches · The link to machines · could move a stage within 1 to 5 years
A fully implanted wireless brain chip lets a paralysed person control a computer
A device under the skin and skull reads the brain's signals and sends them out by radio, with no wire through the skin: nothing to plug in, nothing to infect, usable at home. Wired implants have done this in laboratories since the 1990s. The first fully implanted wireless one was used at home by a woman with motor neurone disease in the Netherlands, reported in 2016, to select letters on a screen. The first high-channel version, with a thousand electrodes, went into a person in January 2024 and let him play chess and games by thought.
What would count
A person with paralysis, fitted with a brain implant that has no wired connection through the skin, controls a computer cursor or selects letters or commands by thought alone, in a peer-reviewed report or the maker's own report of a named patient confirmed independently.
Who settles it: Peer-reviewed reports; the trial sponsor's own report of a named patient, confirmed by a peer-reviewed publication or a regulator's record
Where it stands
First human. Reached on 12 November 2016, on the record of doi.org. Could move a stage within 1 to 5 years.
What it rests on
Needs a first human of: A wired brain implant lets a paralysed person control a cursor.
The last reading
Once a week every upgrade is read against the news, against what would count above. Open a line to see what that week held. Every reading of this upgrade is on this week's reading.
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16 October 2026 Nothing new
Nothing in the window toward the next rung, a regulator's approval: Neuralink (twelve patients as of September 2025), Synchron, Paradromics and Shanghai NeuroXess (a fully wireless implant reported December 2025) are all in trials, and CorTec's second FDA breakthrough designation for its Brain Interchange system speeds a review without approving anything. No source dated in the window was found.
Notes
The record is the 2016 Utrecht report of a locked-in woman using a fully implanted system (two electrode strips over the brain, a transmitter in the chest) to type at home. The earlier example entry on this leaf rested on Neuralink's first implant of 28 January 2024; that remains the first fully implanted wireless chip with electrodes in the brain tissue itself and a thousand channels, and is noted here as a later point on the same ladder rather than the first. The next rung, in clinical use, needs a regulator's approval; several makers were in trials in 2025 and none had one.