Apple is exploring ways to let users control iPhones using neural signals from advanced brain implants. This could enhance accessibility for tens of thousands with severe spinal cord injuries or diseases like ALS, who cannot use their hands.
Rolfe Winkler for The Wall Street Journal:
Apple is looking forward to a day, still some years away, when implants developed by Elon Musk’s Neuralink and its rivals receive approval from the Food and Drug Administration. Such implants, known as brain computer interfaces, have already been safely placed in a handful of patients.
The new capability means Apple devices won’t need to see the user make specific movements, the devices can detect user intentions from decoded brain signals.
Apple has worked on the new standard with Synchron, which makes a stent-like device that is implanted in a vein atop the brain’s motor cortex. The device called the Stentrode has electrodes that read brain signals. It translates the signals into selecting icons on a screen.
Mark Jackson, an early tester of the Stentrode implant, was able to peer over the ledge of a mountain in the Swiss Alps and feel his legs shake. Jackson can’t stand up, and he wasn’t in Switzerland. He was wearing an Apple virtual-reality headset, which was connected to his implant.
Jackson can’t travel from his home outside Pittsburgh because he has ALS. Still, he is learning how to control his iPhone, iPad and Vision Pro headset thanks to a connection between his Stentrode implant and Apple’s various operating systems.
The Synchron device effectively translates brain waves, allowing a user to navigate around a screen and select an icon. It works with a feature inside Apple’s operating system called switch control, which literally switches control to a new input device like a joystick, or in this case a brain implant.
Today, brain computer-interface companies have to trick computers into thinking the signals coming from their implants are coming from a mouse, said Synchron Chief Executive Tom Oxley. More is possible with a standard built specifically for these implants, he said. Apple will release the new standard later this year for other developers.
The first user of Neuralink’s implant has shown that he can move a cursor with his thoughts faster than some people can with a mouse. Its device, called the N1, captures much more brain data than Synchron’s because it has more than 1,000 electrodes picking up neural activity compared with the Stentrode’s 16. Also, the N1’s electrodes are implanted inside the brain rather than placed on top of it. The neural data picked up by its implant is converted into mouse clicks or keyboard strokes.
Musk has extolled the potential of such implants for all people, saying they could amplify the brain’s capabilities and enable humans to compete on equal footing with superintelligent AI systems.
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