BrainGate

BrainGate is a long-running academic clinical-trial consortium (spanning several US universities and hospitals) that has produced many of the foundational human intracortical-BCI results. Its participants — people with tetraplegia from spinal cord injury, brainstem stroke, or ALS — are implanted with one or more 96-channel intracortical microelectrode arrays in motor cortex, and the recorded spiking is decoded for control. BrainGate demonstrations include multi-year point-and-click cursor and typing control, self-directed reach-and-grasp with a robotic arm, restoration of reaching and grasping in the participant's own arm via linked functional electrical stimulation, and high-performance handwriting and speech decoding.

BrainGate is important less as a single device than as the platform on which the field's clinical evidence base was built: it established that intracortical arrays can yield useful control in humans, that recordings can remain usable for years, and that a common hardware substrate can support a widening range of applications as decoding methods improve. Many methods described elsewhere in this field — ReFIT, self-recalibration, handwriting decoding — were validated in BrainGate participants.