ALS Patient Lived with a Brain-Computer Interface for 7 Years. Here’s What Researchers Learned

August 14, 2024

A silicon brain hovering in a computer-generated background

(STAT News) – STAT spoke with Mariska Vansteensel, a neuroscientist at University Medical Centre Utrecht in the Netherlands and president of the international BCI Society, about the field and about a new study that she and her colleagues just published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Vansteensel has spent most of the last decade experimenting with BCI at-home use, rather than in a laboratory, and her team chronicled an ALS patient’s use of the device for over seven years. The 58-year-old woman was diagnosed in 2008 and obtained the device in 2015. Her BCI usage increased as time passed and her paralysis increased. The technology could prove fruitful for ALS patients as their eye-gaze devices lose utility as eye muscle control wanes. (Read More)