“It was a very primitive device,” says Jamie Brannigan, a resident neurologist at Mount Sinai in New York and a BCI expert. “But it was the first example of an in-human brain–computer interface.”
Since then, a more powerful chip, the Utah array, has become the default device for the BCI field. The chip measures 4 mm by 4 mm and includes 100 needlelike probes, each measuring 1.5 mm, which penetrate brain tissue. It was first implanted in a human being in 2004, and has been the go-to chip for most BCI work since.
“The Utah array has a proven track record of safety, reliability, and longevity,” says Solzbacher.
Blackrock’s 50 implant surgeries certainly suggest that there’s evidence behind what it claims it can do with the chip, but the company’s competitors aren’t so certain. For starters, even at 4 mm by 4 mm, the Utah array would be too big and clumsy a hunk of hardware for Science to implant in the eye or Synchron to thread through a vein. And the 100 probes, while a not inconsiderable number, put a ceiling on how much data the system can carry.
