AsianFin -- On January 1, 2025, a groundbreaking milestone in brain-computer interface (BCI) technology was achieved in a hospital room at Huashan Hospital, Shanghai, Shanghai Observer reported.
A female patient, unable to move or speak, successfully sent a New Year’s greeting using only her thoughts. The phrase “Happy New Year 2025” was decoded by a computer and used to control a robotic hand, which performed a heart-shaped gesture symbolizing love and well wishes.
This marks the first-ever New Year’s greeting delivered entirely through thought, a historic achievement led by NeuroXess and the neurosurgery team at Huashan Hospital. The project was supported by the Tianqiao & Chrissy Chen Institute and utilized domestically developed invasive flexible BCI technology.
The accomplishment demonstrates significant advances in both motor and language decoding, enabling the translation of thoughts into actions (“do”) and words (“speak”). With this breakthrough, NeuroXress becomes the world’s only company to achieve real-time motor decoding and real-time Mandarin decoding using invasive BCI technology.
The success not only underscores China’s leadership in the global BCI field but also highlights unprecedented progress in decoding real-time Chinese language, a major leap toward bridging human thoughts with technology.
While brain-computer interfaces are gaining momentum globally, with companies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink pioneering invasive BCI technologies, the focus has primarily been on motor decoding, noted international scientists during the recent BCI Society International Forum in Shanghai.
Remarkable achievements include enabling paralyzed patients to control robotic arms for drinking water, playing video games, or using exoskeletons to walk again. However, the next frontier is language decoding, they emphasized.
The successful decoding of Mandarin thoughts represents a new era for BCIs. While global progress in motor decoding has empowered patients with physical disabilities, this development addresses the challenge of understanding and translating human language directly from neural activity.
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