- Health IT
- 2 min read
Neuralink shows first brain-chip patient playing online chess
Noland Arbaugh, the 29-year-old patient who was paralyzed below the shoulder after a diving accident, was playing chess on his laptop and moving the cursor using the Neuralink device.E
Noland Arbaugh, the 29-year-old patient who was paralyzed below the shoulder after a diving accident, was playing chess on his laptop and moving the cursor using the Neuralink device.
He had received an implant from the company in January and could control a computer mouse using his thoughts, Musk said last month.
"The surgery was super easy," Arbaugh said in the video streamed on Musk's social media platform X, referring to the implant procedure. "I literally was released from the hospital a day later. I have no cognitive impairments.
Kip Ludwig, former program director for neural engineering at the U.S. National Institutes of Health, said what Neuralink showed was not a "breakthrough."
"It is still in the very early days post-implantation, and there is a lot of learning on both the Neuralink side and the subject's side to maximize the amount of information for control that can be achieved," he added.
Even so, Ludwig said it was a positive development for the patient that they have been able to interface with a computer in a way they were not able to before the implant. "It's certainly a good starting point," he said.
Last month, Reuters reported that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration inspectors found problems with record keeping and quality controls for animal experiments at Elon Musk's Neuralink, less than a month after the startup said it was cleared to test its brain implants in humans. Neuralink did not respond then to questions about the FDA's inspection. (Reporting by Surbhi Misra, Shivani Tanna, Nilutpal Timsina and Marisa Taylor; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)
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