BCI Can Reach Millions. Neurotech Decided It Shouldn't

InnovationBCI Can Reach Millions. Neurotech Decided It Shouldn'tByTetiana Aleksandrova,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)May 18, 2026, 10:30am EDTTetiana Aleksandrova is Founder & CEO of brain-computer interface company Subsense Inc. getty​Neurotech is stagnating. Science is advancing, but the patients who need this technology most are still unreached. That gap isn’t biology. It is what has been accepted in our field.Built On A Bad Bet​A brain-computer interface (BCI) captures neural activity and translates it into control signals for an external device. The most familiar example is a patient with paralysis using their thoughts to move a robotic arm, with the system reading intention and converting it into action in real time.​The industry has long accepted who this technology is for: surgical candidates with specific diagnoses and the means to afford invasive procedures. Scalability was never part of the design goal for BCI. The tech got treated as a biological necessity, something baked into the nature of the problem that was made early and never revisited.Today, only a few hundred people have received any form of implanted neural interface, which is a tiny fraction of those living with conditions that BCI could significantly help.​ Meanwhile, cortical electrode arrays, the gold standard for high-resolution signal capture, cover less than a square centimeter of brain surface. The field has spent decades developing a tool that, by design, can only reach a small portion of the people who need it.​That’s the actual problem, not the advancements in electrode materials, compute or regulatory pathways. It was the assumption that BCI wasn’t necessary for all, calcified into benchmarks, funding priorities and research agendas, all reinforcing each other and built on a premise nobody was questioning.​When...