China's Brain-Computer Interface Firms Top 200, but Researcher Says It's Not Yet a Rigid Need

At the Boao Forum for Asia Global Health Forum in Haikou on Sept. 15, a report meeting on brain-computer interface (BCI) medical device industry innovation brought together researchers and industry leaders. Zuo Nianming, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Automation, said BCI can empower more than the 10% to 15% of people who need medical resources.

But he used four phrases to capture the technology's deployment dilemma: inconvenient, unstable, unintelligent and not a rigid need. He cited visual evoked typing as an example: it may look feasible in the lab, but in reality, who would carry a screen around every day just to communicate?

Policy is accelerating even as technology lags. BCI was written into China's government work report for the first time and included in the 15th Five-Year Plan outline. Local governments have issued rules to support the sector. China now has more than 200 BCI companies, and the market is projected to reach 120 billion yuan by 2040. Yet Zuo's four 'nots' separate speed from maturity: company numbers and market forecasts are rising, but real-world usability has not crossed the threshold.

At a roundtable, Tao Hu, founder and chief scientist of Shanghai-based NeuroXess, said research and industry follow different logics. Research starts from interest and is evaluated by papers; industry starts from demand and succeeds or fails on system-level and product-level considerations. BCI, though called an interface, is actually a microsystem. Single-point breakthroughs matter, but at this stage success still depends on system layout.

Xie Jue, deputy general manager of Beijing Xinzhi Da Neural Technology, offered a gold standard for implantable BCI: if a problem can be solved another way, patients may not choose an implant. The company therefore targets problems that BCI can address but other technologies cannot—patients' rigid needs. This standard ties technology route to patient decisions: not what technology can do, but what choices remain after other options fail.

Regulation is being built, but remains early. Wang Ying, a researcher at the Center for Medical Device Evaluation of the National Medical Products Administration, described review concerns ranging from electrode biocompatibility to decoding algorithm generalization, from wireless communication performance of signal processors to false-trigger risks from extra functions in actuating devices. A lifecycle regulatory framework is taking shape. Hu Sheng, deputy director of the Active Device Testing Institute at the Shanghai Medical Device Testing Institute, said standardization has three steps: conceptual norms, technical norms and application norms. It is still at a very early stage. That early-stage assessment echoes Zuo's four 'nots.' Regulatory standardization depends on technology maturity. As long as technology still struggles with being inconvenient, unstable and unintelligent, standards can only remain at the conceptual stage.

Zuo proposed three evolution directions: medical health, natural interaction and brain-computer intelligent agents. Medical health is a rigid need—it helps people live healthily. Natural interaction helps people live happily. Brain-computer agents could extend human life. Among the three, medical health has the strongest rigid-need attribute and is where policy and capital are currently concentrated. Yet even in this most rigid scenario, Zuo said, a great deal of public education is needed so people understand BCI's boundaries. When the consensus that technology should be used for good aligns with the pace of innovation, the boundary of rigid demand will become clearer. For now, policy and company counts are running ahead, while the match between technology and real demand is still being negotiated.