#A 29-year-old Chinese man, identified as A, suffered a spinal cord injury in an accident. Motor signals sent from the brain should travel down the spinal cord to the muscles, but the nerves were severed, leaving A paralyzed in the lower body for five years. A later underwent surgery to implant a chip in the brain. The chip reads brain signals, and researchers consolidated these signals to a spinal cord electrical stimulation device and a gait-assist exoskeleton. In place of the severed nerves, the machine was made to receive the brain's signals. As a result, after months of rehabilitation, A was able to walk slowly with the help of the gait-assist device.
On the 19th in the afternoon at the Beijing Institute for Brain Science (CIBR) in Pingchang District in northern Beijing. A representative of "NeuCyber," known as China's version of Neuralink, presented a successful case of brain-machine interface (BMI) therapy and said, "With the effect of spinal cord stimulation, bladder and bowel functions were also partially restored, significantly improving the patient's quality of life."
The representative also shared another case of a person with quadriplegia and explained that the BMI system helps restore physical functions in patients with nerve damage beyond simply transmitting brain signals. The representative said, "Within six months of the chip implant, the patient was able to pick up beads with two fingers, showing progress toward restoring hand function in about a year." The technology has evolved beyond the conventional BMI concept of reading brain signals to control machines, aiming to rebuild functions in patients with nerve damage.
BMI, or brain-computer interface (BCI), is a technology that reads brain signals to control machines. Human thought and behavior are based on the electrical activity generated by neurons in the brain, and a chip attached to the brain records and decodes the electrical signals of these neurons and converts them into code to interact with external machinery and equipment. Until now, corporations such as the U.S. company Neuralink have mainly focused on computer control using brain signals, but recently in China, clinical results have emerged that go beyond computer control to the restoration of physical function.
China has designated BMI and BCI as national strategic industries and is moving to foster them. Early this month, BMI appeared for the first time in the government work report, where it was specified as a "future industry," and it was also placed among key priority areas in the 15th five-year plan (2026–2030). In response, relevant ministries are rolling out policies to develop the BMI industry one after another. Institutional foundations are also being built, including the establishment of medical device standards and reimbursement systems. The Chinese government expects that within the next 10 years, the BMI industry will reach a scale equivalent to creating a new major high-tech industry, and is supporting research, clinical trials, and industrialization centered on major cities such as Beijing and Shenzhen.
As part of a national science and technology innovation project, the Beijing municipal government jointly established the brain science institute in 2018 with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Peking University, and Tsinghua University, and has continued related research. The institute recruited 40 experts from around the world and filed a total of 79 brain science technology patents over about seven years. Papers released in prominent international journals such as Nature and Science number 472.
Spun out from the institute, the startup NeuCyber co-developed the BMI system "Beinao" with the institute. The main feature of Beinao is that it is less invasive than existing BMIs while reading more signals stably. Because electrodes are attached not inside the brain but on the brain surface (epidural), it reduces the burden of surgery while simultaneously collecting signals through more than 100 channels to significantly raise throughput. In addition, an ultra-small chip processes signals inside the body and transmits them wirelessly to external devices, allowing it to operate without separate wired consolidation.
NeuCyber is currently in full swing with clinical trials involving actual people. From 2025 to recently, it successfully completed a total of seven implant surgeries. Of the seven patients, four have spinal cord injuries, and one patient has ALS and two have had strokes. However, as it is still in the early clinical stage, further verification is needed regarding long-term effects and generalizability. A company representative said, "The Beinao system has accumulated more than 44,000 hours of safe operation," and added, "Going forward, we will increase system input and introduce more big data and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to attempt multimodal decoding."