Three weeks after surgery, the man who had lost both arms and both legs to an electric shock was moving a cursor on a screen using only his thoughts. No keyboard. No voice. Just intention, read through a coin-sized device buried in his skull.
This is not a lab curiosity. It is the first long-term, invasive brain–computer interface (脑机接口) implant trial conducted in China — and the second such program in the world after Elon Musk's Neuralink.
What actually happened
In the first quarter of 2025, a team from Shanghai StairMed Technology Co., Ltd. (阶梯医疗) implanted its system at Huashan Hospital, affiliated with Fudan University, in Shanghai. The subject was a person who had lived for years without any limbs after a high-voltage accident.
The surgery did not resemble the open-cranium operations many imagine. Surgeons drilled a small pocket into the skull — about five millimetres deep — and punched a 3–5 mm micro-hole through which two hair-thin flexible electrodes were inserted into the motor cortex. The whole procedure took roughly one hour. The implant itself is about 26 mm across and under 6 mm thick, sitting flush with the bone so that, once the scalp healed, it could not be felt from outside.
StairMed says its electrodes are about one-hundredth the width of a human hair, and that the electrode cross-section is roughly one-fifth to one-seventh that of Neuralink's threads. Whether those comparisons hold up independently, the core point is materials: ultra-flexible polymer threads that bend with the brain rather than fighting it.
The training worked like this. The subject was first asked to imagine moving a virtual arm left and right, which moved a ball on screen. Over sessions, the link became so natural that he stopped thinking about the arm at all — he just looked at the target and the cursor went there. After about a week of recovery the subject went home. Within a month he was playing a racing game and chess by thought alone. Three weeks of training brought his cursor control to a level comparable to an ordinary person using a laptop trackpad.
Why stability matters more than channels
Here is the quiet engineering problem the field obsesses over: an electrode that works on day one but drifts, scars, or falls out by week six is useless as medicine.
StairMed's trial was small — two electrodes, 64 channels, a far lower count than Neuralink's 64 electrodes and 1,024 channels. But the company reports that, months in, the implanted threads showed no displacement and the signal stayed stable. That matters because Neuralink's first human subject experienced substantial thread retraction in the early weeks — a widely reported setback. A flexible, minimally invasive thread that stays put may beat a higher-channel rigid one that doesn't.
The device charges and transmits wirelessly, with no wire breaking the skin. The subject described forgetting the implant was there.
The road from one patient to a product
StairMed (阶梯医疗) was founded in August 2021 and is built around researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology — founders Zhao Zhengtuo (赵郑拓) and Li Xue (李雪). The company has run more than 50 investigator-initiated studies and says it holds the world's largest dataset of single-cell recordings from flexible electrodes in humans.
In February 2025 it closed a 3.5亿元 (≈ US$48.6M / HK$380M) Series B round led by Qiming Venture Partners (启明创投), OrbiMed (奥博资本) and Lilly Asia Ventures (礼来亚洲基金) — the largest single financing on record in China's implantable BCI sector.
The clinical plan is concrete:
- A first-in-human (FIM) cohort of 3–4 implanted patients, with about a year of follow-up.
- A larger multi-centre registration trial, expected to open in early 2026, recruiting 30–40 subjects.
- A product on the market around 2028, if the registration pathway holds.
The company also registered a formal study, "STAIR," on ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT06944834) — a minimally invasive wireless implant evaluated for motor rehabilitation, with an estimated five participants and completion targeted for 2027 at Tangdu Hospital in Xi'an.
Invasive, but barely
It is worth being precise about the route. "Invasive" BCI means electrodes inside the skull; StairMed's version is invasive but minimally so, avoiding the robot-driven deep insertion others use. That is a deliberate Chinese bet: capture high-quality neural signal without the infection and tissue-damage risks of open surgery. It is a different trade-off from both Neuralink's rigid threads and the semi-invasive "North Brain" (北脑一号) implants reported elsewhere. Each team is gambling on a different balance of signal quality against surgical risk.
Policy is moving in parallel. In 2025 StairMed was named to a Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (工信部) "future industry" breakthrough list, and Shanghai has backed it through a dedicated BCI fund.
What readers can do now
- If you or a family member has a spinal injury or limb loss, watch legitimate tertiary-hospital BCI programs rather than consumer "miracle" gadgets; StairMed's system is years from sale.
- For researchers and clinicians, the company's open clinical-trial registration (STAIR, NCT06944834) is the place to track verified progress.
- Treat any "available now" invasive BCI claim in China with suspicion — none has a commercial licence yet.
Honest limitations
This account draws on People's Daily app and The Paper (澎湃) reporting on the trial, plus StairMed's own disclosures and the ClinicalTrials.gov registry. The electrode-size comparisons to Neuralink are company statements, not independently benchmarked. The "no displacement / stable signal" claim describes a single subject over a period the company has not fully disclosed in peer-reviewed form; longer follow-up is pending. The 2028 market date is the company's projection, not a regulatory commitment, and depends on a multi-centre trial and NMPA (国家药监局) review that have not yet concluded. Enrollment and dates in NCT06944834 are "estimated" and may shift.