BrainGate Consortium (lab brief)
Official site → Providence, RI, USA
BrainGate is one of the most important long-running invasive BCI clinical research efforts. Public-facing descriptions emphasize restoring communication, mobility, and independence for people with paralysis.
- BrainGate site: https://www.braingate.org/
A landmark result: brain-to-text via attempted handwriting (Nature, 2021)
A widely cited BrainGate-linked demonstration decoded attempted handwriting trajectories from intracortical recordings to produce text at high speed.
- Willett et al., Nature (2021): “High-performance brain-to-text communication via handwriting.”
A readable overview with some performance numbers:
- Brown Daily Herald (Jun 2021): https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2021/06/braingate-consortium-develops-new-approach-of-brain-to-text-communication-through-handwriting
Why BrainGate matters
If you want to understand what intracortical arrays can do at the “high performance” end, BrainGate is one of the strongest evidence bases.
It’s also a good example of a translational pipeline:
- carefully run clinical research
- repeated improvements in decoding methods
- longer-term attention to usability and at-home use
What to watch
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Generalization + daily use How performance holds up across days without re-training.
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Scaling channels and stability What hardware stack they use and how signal quality evolves.
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Clinical commercialization path How/when these systems become actual products.
Notes on sourcing
Draft. We should add additional peer-reviewed BrainGate papers and (if needed) ClinicalTrials.gov identifiers for the relevant trials.