A small group of paralyzed Neuralink participants is now driving powered wheelchairs using only signals recorded from a chip implanted in the motor cortex, the strip of brain tissue that plans movement. The company's N1 implant, a coin-sized device with more than a thousand electrode threads inserted by a surgical robot, reads the electrical spikes neurons fire when a person merely intends to move a limb. Software then translates that intent, not the movement itself, into a command a wheelchair's motor controller can execute: forward, turn, stop.

The mechanism works because the motor cortex still tries to plan movement even after a spinal injury severs the path to the muscles. The signal is there; the road out of the brain is blocked. Neuralink's decoder listens upstream of the blockage and reroutes the command over Bluetooth instead of nerve fiber. That is the same trick behind the company's cursor-control demos, extended from a screen to a wheelchair's motor controller. The result is still a small trial cohort under an FDA early feasibility study, not a cleared consumer product, and Neuralink has not published wheelchair-specific accuracy or latency figures in a peer-reviewed venue. The next gate is whether that data, including how the system handles obstacles and multi-hour real-world use outside a lab, appears in a submission the FDA can act on.