Implanted devices let people control computers and prosthetic limbs with their minds. But nobody knows how long they’ll last—and when they’ll need upgrades.
himself a cyborg. The 36-year-old has lived with a brain-computer interface for more than seven years and three months. As of today—August 17—that’s the longest anyone has had an implant like this.
But questions still remain about the long-term durability of the implanted arrays—how much their performance will erode over time, and whether they could be upgraded. “It would be utterly maddening to have function restored for years, then lose it again. And that is always a concern with implanted devices that may require service,” Huggins says.
Copeland received his first array in 2015 and later gained three more as part of the study, giving him a total of four active implants. Called Utah arrays, they are made of hard silicon and look a bit like the bristly part of a hairbrush. A standard array is a square grid with 100 tiny needles, each about a millimeter long and coated with conductive metal.
To build a brain-computer interface, researchers have to translate those neural signals into digital commands that let the wearer drive a prosthetic limb or a computer. The system Copeland uses, called BrainGate, involves an implanted array, a cable that runs from a nickel-sized pedestal on his head to an external device that amplifies his neural signals, and a computer that runs software to decode those signals.
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