Similar to Elon Musk’s Neurlink, Synchron is an American implanted brain manufacturing firm that seeks to develop technologies that can assist people deal with all types of brain disorders while creating a product that won’t harm other body parts. 2016 marks the sixth year since the founding of both businesses, but Synchron prevailed over Neuralink in the field of human testing. An ASL sufferer from Merican will receive Synchron’s first neural device through an implant.
Synchron was founded in Australia, but because Australian rules on what can be inserted into a human brain are stricter than those in America, they relocated there for their additional research. Recently, the FDA gave Synchron’s procedures the green light and gave their Stent-electrode recording array the all-clear (Stentrode). The first of the six patients to receive the Stentrode implant is a man by the name of Graham Felstad; this experiment, which cost $10 million to complete, is supported by the National Institutes of Health. The patients will be able to text, call, and pretty much do anything else a regular person can do with their internet-connected devices just by thinking about it thanks to this. Stent rod is being inserted.
Stentrodes operate similarly to pacemakers in that they are implanted by a wire into a blood vessel in the middle of the brain, and when the wire is pulled out, a coil of stent-electrodes is inserted inside the vessel. That coil uses Brain Bluetooth to send the neurological impulses the brain emits to the electronic device it is attached to, such as a phone or a laptop (the name given by Synchron).
One of the reasons Synchron got permission for human testing before the Neuralink is that it doesn’t require opening the skull of the patient. Neuralink on the other hand has been working on an implantable brain-machine interface since 2016 that is a derivation of the traditional Utah Array which require the skull to get some drilling. While it previously demonstrated its progress by showing a Macaque monkey controlling the cursor in a game of Pong, it has yet to start human trials.
Elon Musk on 22nd August Tweeted that Neuralink is ready to show the world what they have achieved yet and will host a “show and tell” event on Halloween. He Tweeted;
“Neuralink progress update show & tell on October 31 st (Halloween)”
Still, after the successful implantation Nicholas Oppie who is a CTO and founder of Synchron is concerned that this is not the final and sustainable model for all the neural conditions as the Stentrode is in a blood vessel running through the brain, so the bandwidth is very limited as compared to the Utah Array that went directly into the cortex of the brain. This results in the limited distance the person can operate, speed, and efficiency and limits the overall tasks someone with implantation can perform.
Though Synchron is solving many problems they are still not providing full solutions and that’s where Neuralink comes in. Neuralink brings the best from both worlds as the Utah Array and Synchron’s Stentrode, though a small chunk of your skull has to be removed for the procedure, it does not look as bad as Utah Array and you don’t have to wire with a bunch of stuff.
Once the small device, called The Link displaced inside the patient’s cortex by a robot, doctors will stitch it up and the hairs will most probably come back again. The person will be connected to Bluetooth forever and can use the devices by using their thinking.
This process is very complex and multiple monkeys and pigs died during the experimentation. Though Elon Musk claims that he would get FDA approval for human testing by the end of the year he said that last year too.
