The Food and Drug Administration's approval for Elon Musk's Neuralink to implant its brain chip into a second person comes as the first test participant describes the glitches he overcame.
Noland Arbaugh, a quadriplegic who was the first user of the Neuralink, told The Wall Street Journal that the implant that allowed him to control a cursor on a computer screen with only his thoughts stopped working a month after the surgery.
"I was on such a high and then to be brought down that low, it was very, very hard," Arbaugh told the newspaper. "I cried."
Arbaugh told the Journal that Neuralink has told him that about 15% of the threads inserted in his brain remain in place and have stabilized. He said software changes made by the company later helped him regain many of the device's capabilities.
"I thought that I had just gotten to scratch the surface of this amazing technology, and then it was all going to be taken away," Arbaugh told the Journal. "But it only took me a few days to really recover from that and realize that everything I've done up to that point was going to benefit everyone who came after me."
Arbaugh also told the Journal the company's engineers improved the performance of his own device and improved things to where he said he's now surpassed the capabilities he had before the threads retracted.
"It makes me very, very hopeful for the future," he told the Journal. "It seems like we've learned a lot and it seems like things are going in the right direction."
Fixes in a new product include placing some of the device's ultrathin wires deeper into the brain, the Journal reported.
Neuralink hopes to implant a second participant sometime in June; it also aims to submit applications to regulators in Canada and Britain in coming months to start similar trials in those countries, the Journal reported.
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