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The US FDA hopes that medical devices that are not easily removable can exist safely in the human body for at least 10 years. “If you want to test whether something can last 10 years, you have to wait 10 years.” said Matt Angle, CEO of Paradromics, a brain-computer interface company in Texas.
In general, although Neuralink has made the implant device very small and the implantation operation is very simple, it still cannot guarantee how long the implant can stay in the human body. Perhaps, Neuralink will solve this problem by regularly replacing implanted devices. Musk also mentioned at the press conference that over time, users can upgrade implanted devices.
Little pig experiment is actually not that fresh
At the press conference site, Neuralink specially found three piglets, one of which was implanted with electrodes, and the other was taken out with electrodes implanted.
Why use piglets as experimental subjects? The Neuralink researcher’s answer was “the chest of a pig is very similar to the ribs of a human”, but a doctor of pattern recognition and intelligence systems from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences with neuroanatomy experience told Pinwan: “I used pigs to do experiments. The brain is cheap enough, big enough, and simple enough. This is an advantage over traditional model animals such as monkeys, orangutans, and mice. The use of pig brains enables low-cost’quick iteration’ and is more likely to succeed in attempts.”< /p>
At the press conference, Neuralink demonstrated the reading and writing of neural signals with piglets implanted with electrodes. According to the above-mentioned doctor of the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, this is because the fundamental solution to the practical problem of brain-computer interfaces lies in the formation of a closed-loop control system, which requires direct neural signal reading and writing functions.