described<\/a> the results his team published as the crossing of a threshold in BCI technology: Not only has Harrell\u2019s implant been working well with daily use since 2023, but it\u2019s also incredibly accurate. <\/p>\nIn controlled tests, the system managed to synthesize sentences from Harrell\u2019s brain activity with 99 percent accuracy; outside of the lab in daily use, Harrell still assessed it as being accurate 92 percent of the time.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe key thing to me is that it\u2019s enabling everyday communication for a guy who wants to talk but can\u2019t,\u201d Brandman told The Register in an interview. \u201cDespite being paralyzed [Harrell] has gone back to work full time and has meaningful conversations with his daughter who\u2019s never heard the sound of his voice.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Prior work in the BCI space, Brandman told us, has either required researchers to be in a patient\u2019s home whenever they\u2019re using the tech, or for the patient to come to the researchers. That\u2019s not the case here, with the system allowing Harrell\u2019s home care team to hook him up to the system themselves, enabling him to use the device for more than 3,800 hours in the past few years. Based on the time the study was filed (It published Monday but went into peer review in July 2025) that would mean Harrell was using the device for more than five hours a day, on average.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is a life that is more full of dynamic action and with friends and family, with colleagues, and it is something that allows me to communicate more in my natural way of communicating than any other technology that I have experienced,\u201d Harrell told UC Davis via his BCI system.\u00a0<\/p>\n
An actual practical use of AI<\/p>\n
Brandman is no stranger to BCI technology: Along with being a key figure in the BrainGate consortium, he\u2019s also worked as study principal in investigating the safety of commercial BCI tech from Paradromics, one of the leading companies in the space alongside Synchron and Neuralink.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As Brandman explained it, the Davis study didn\u2019t involve any purpose-built hardware, instead making use of an existing BCI design produced by Blackrock Neurotech. The big advancement, says the Davis neurosurgeon, is with his team\u2019s use of machine learning technology.\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"Harrell's](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/5256516.webp\")
<\/p>\n
\n Harrell’s home BCI setup
\n SOURCE: Regents of the University of California, Davis\n <\/p>\n
The lab has built its own software platform for operating BCI devices known as Brain-computer interface for Rapidly Adaptive Neural Decoding (BRAND, which Brandman told us was coincidentally named), which UCD postdoctoral fellow Nick Card built machine learning algorithms for. BRAND is now used across the BrainGate consortium, and is where the secret sauce of the project\u2019s success lies.\u00a0<\/p>\n
According to the paper, BRAND\u2019s AI algorithms are able to translate activity in Harrell\u2019s ventral precentral gyrus, the part of the brain that controls motor function in the face, mouth, and jaw, into English-language phonemes. Additional algorithms in the software map those phonemes to words, and words to sentences. The end result is some very precise speech synthesis that allows Harrell to work full time as an environmental advocate.<\/p>\n
As for when the technology being developed by the UCD team might hit the commercial market, Brandman tells us that other technologies in the BCI space, such as those from Neuralink and others, are all working on tech with the same sorts of goals. His team\u2019s objective is just to prove that BCI systems are more than just dead-end laboratory experiments.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy job is to derisk it,\u201d Brandman told us.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He likened the current state of BCI technology to early pacemakers, which started off in the 1950s having to be wired to hardware outside the body that was often connected to large batteries or directly tethered to the wall. Fast forward seventy years, and pacemakers are so simple to implant they\u2019re often done in an outpatient procedure.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re at the early stages of this kind of technology,\u201d Brandman said. \u201cCasey has demonstrated that this kind of tech is practical.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Harrell may be wired up to a bunch of bulky external computers now, but combine the Davis UCD team\u2019s AI advancements with the hardware work being done by other firms, and the future looks brighter for a lot of people whose lives are limited by paralysis and other impairments.<\/p>\n
\u201cI want desperately to not be unique or special, because that will mean I no longer have the disease or that everyone that has the disease like me can get [BCI] prescribed to them,\u201d Harrell said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
BrainGate is currently accepting applications for future study participants. \u00ae<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"science The hardware isn’t new, but a UC Davis research team’s machine learning-powered method of translating brain activity…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":642379,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-642378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=642378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642378\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/642379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=642378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=642378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=642378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Harrell](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/5256514.webp\")
<\/p>\n