Can somebody who is knowledgeable in this field of work explain how/if neuralink is better to the previous approaches and if its easier to "scale" this tech compared to previous works ?
This is primarily an advance in the systems integration required to make such a sensor fully implantable abs capable of wireless transmission. It also ~10x’s the number of channels of the Utah array, which is the primary point of comparison as a product that can currently be used in human patients (in an investigational context as part of clinical trials). The Utah arrays do not have any active electronics however, and pass a bundle of wires through the skin, which has obvious disadvantages and scaling limitations.
NL’s approach is scalable due to their robotic insertion system which can implant a (multi-channel) thread every few seconds. It should be possible to hit a few thousand channels within the window of a few hour surgery. They do face the same challenges with size, weight, and power that everyone else does, which forces trade offs on the bandwidth, ability to isolate spikes from individual neurons, and number of active channels.
The primary limitation of this approach is that the needles cannot easily insert deeper than the outer layer of cortex (to my knowledge). This limits the application space to anything with recording or stimulation targets on the surface. Motor prostheses and gaming are perfect for this due to the anatomy, but many other medical applications require deeper targets, which their sensor cannot readily hit at the moment.
This is a great summary. I will just add that my understanding is that Neuralink is heavily focused on surgical speed, and a few seconds per thread is the slowest it will ever be. It will likely be much faster than that.
The article describes how it has advanced: it's wireless and reads relatively more electrodes. Producing the device is something that can probably scale up easilt . 1024 electrodes is still nowhere near enough to decode precise movements imho. These pong experiments have been done in humans since 20 years ago, but real fluidity seems very difficult to achieve , because signals are noisy, the brain adapts, distractors are always present etc. The article doesnt mention how long it takes until the device needs recalibration. OTOH brain surgery is not something easy to scale and i doubt people will accept surgery for implanting 2 devices just to play pong. Such a device should be precise enough to allow using a robotic arm effectively.
I think the applications of this are going to be in research for years, not as implants that paralyzed people can readily use.
