NEO

In March 2026, China's National Medical Products Administration approved NEO, a coin-sized brain implant from a Shanghai startup and Tsinghua University, for paralyzed patients to take home — the first invasive brain-computer interface any national regulator has cleared for use beyond a clinical trial. Neuralink, the name most readers know, has not reached that point.

"I couldn't believe I was able to write again" — a patient paralyzed six years, the implant reading intent off the surface of the brain and driving a soft glove over his hand.

The surprise is what NEO doesn't do. Neuralink's threads pierce the cortex to eavesdrop on individual neurons, the highest-resolution signal there is. NEO's eight sensors rest on the dura, the tough membrane over the brain, reading a blurrier signal from outside. That costs bandwidth. But penetrating electrodes provoke scar tissue that buries them — intracortical arrays can go quiet on most of their channels within a year — and sensors that never break the surface sidestep that decay. A ninety-minute operation, no robot surgeon, a signal that should last.

The first commercial BCI, in other words, is the deliberately humbler one. The frontier didn't move by reading the brain more deeply; it moved by reading it just well enough to clear a regulator and survive for years in a body.

One trial patient, paralyzed by spinal-cord injury, grasped a ball by his ninth day of training — without the robotic glove that normally does the gripping — and, after some eleven months of daily sessions, could write his own name again. Eligibility is narrow — spinal-cord paralysis, ages 18 to 60, some residual arm function — and China has already issued NEO an insurance code, the bureaucratic step that turns an approval into something a patient can actually be billed for.