A monkey with soft electrode filaments implanted in its brain, controlled an isolated robotic arm and grasped a strawberry by simply using its "thoughts."
This innovative achievement in the application of China's brain-machine interface (BMI) technology was unveiled at the 2024 Zhongguancun Forum held in Beijing last month.
The NeuCyber Array BMI System, which was independently developed by Chinese scientists, fills the gap in high-performance invasive BMI technology in China, said Luo Minmin, director of the Chinese Institute for Brain Research, Beijing, which codeveloped the system with NeuCyber NeuroTech (Beijing).
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With the development of technologies such as neuroscience, computational electronics and medicine over the years, BMI, as a frontier technology of human-computer interaction, has been a major force in leading a new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial change.
The progress of multi-disciplines and technologies is accelerating the arrival of the BMI industry, making China not only a major innovation hub but also a target market for BMI technology, according to experts at the ZGC Forum.
BMI technology innovation has been used in about 40 countries and regions, with nearly 80 percent of the results emerging in the past decade, said Gu Xiaosong, an academician with the Chinese Academy of Engineering.
China is among the countries with the largest number of BMI scientific research projects, with a large scale and fast growth of scientific research output. Its invention patent applications involving BMI, account for more than half of the global total, Gu said.
"In the past 20 years, BMI technology has developed rapidly, and its application fields are gradually expanding," said Zhao Jizong, an academician with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Mainly used in the medical field, BMI technology can bring new solutions for the diagnosis and treatment of nervous system conditions, such as epilepsy, Parkinson's disease, depression, paralysis, stroke, Alzheimer's disease, sleep disorders and autism.
Industry insiders believe that BMI technology innovation, rich clinical resources and the huge demand for brain disease treatments are advantages that will drive the development of China's BMI industry.
Hong Bo, a professor from Tsinghua University's School of Medicine, said China needs to seize the opportunity by accelerating innovations in BMI technology to promote industrial development.
BMI technology has a huge potential market. In the medical field alone, the potential global market of the BMI industry is expected to hit $40 billion between 2030 and 2040, according to consultancy McKinsey & Company. In addition, BMI has great potential in markets such as healthcare and entertainment, it said.
"BMI technology has broad development prospects and huge market potential in many sectors, and is a typical representative of the future industries," said Jiang Juncheng, deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology.
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As a rising sci-tech global innovation hub, Beijing, which is strong in the research and development of BMI, has made major breakthroughs in recent years in the analysis of brain cognitive principles and major disease research.
Beijing recently set out a road map for accelerating the development of the BMI industry.
By 2026, it plans to achieve breakthroughs in core BMI technologies and cultivate a number of leading enterprises. By 2030, with an independently well-developed BMI system, hundreds of small and medium-sized enterprises will be nurtured in the capital city, forming an industrial cluster.
According to the plan, Beijing will strengthen the integrated innovation of key technologies, enrich the supply of BMI products and build an industrial ecology with coordinated development. It will also promote the demonstration of applying BMI in five fields: medicine, healthcare, industrial safety, education and sports, and smart life.
