China’s Brain-Computer Interface Race Hits Clinic
China’s brain-computer interface (BCI) industry has crossed a decisive threshold, moving from laboratory prototypes to clinical prescriptions and operating tables. A report published by the Economic Daily and republished by Xinhua News describes a sector accelerating past key technical and regulatory hurdles, with Shanghai emerging as its leading hub.
The milestone came in March 2026, when Boruikang Medical Technology (Shanghai) obtained the world’s first Class III medical device registration certificate for an invasive BCI. Within four months, Huashan Hospital, affiliated with Fudan University, used the device to issue the world’s first clinical prescription for an invasive BCI, helping a patient paralyzed for years regain control of his hand.
“Besides one approved product, Shanghai currently has five Class III products in clinical trials and review stages,” said Wang Zhuoyao, BCI project manager at the Shanghai Municipal Science and Technology Commission.
From Lab to Operating Table
BCI technology links the human brain directly to external devices, bypassing nerves and muscles so that thought alone can drive a computer, robotic arm or wheelchair. The stakes are high: the field promises to restore function for people with severe neurological injury.
The first patient in the world to receive a clinical prescription suffered a spinal cord injury in a car accident ten years ago that impaired his grip. Boruikang’s system collects and decodes epidural EEG signals, identifies movement intent, and establishes a pathway between brain and external device to compensate for lost hand function.
Progress is not limited to invasive devices. Shanghai Kongshanci Technology has developed what it describes as the world’s first integrated transcranial magnetic neuromodulation navigation system for treating depression. The system combines functional MRI, structured-light 3D cameras, electromagnetic field simulation and a collaborative robotic arm, enabling a tailored approach to each patient.
“Traditional treatment is ‘one target for a thousand people’; we do ‘one target per person,’” said Zeng Huaiyang, product director at Kongshanci. Clinical data from ten depression patients treated for one week showed that 80% had Hamilton scale reductions of over 50%.
At the consumer end, Shanghai Yuanxi Intelligent Technology has built a “brain-controlled popcorn machine” that activates when a lightweight headband detects a user’s focus level crossing a threshold. The company says the same technology can support attention training for young people.
Breaking Down Data Silos
Advancing BCI from lab to clinic depends on data—and high-quality brain data is hard to obtain. Intracranial EEG can only be collected during neurosurgery, and cross-center sharing has long been hobbled by privacy concerns, ethics approvals and incompatible formats.
Lingxiyun Medical Technology, which began accumulating brain-function data in 2019, now hosts a database of roughly 2.1 million cases at petabyte scale, spanning EEG, imaging, scales, medication and follow-up data. Its DEVB-SEEG fusion visualization system helps localize epileptic lesions and has been deployed at Xuanwu Hospital and Sanbo Brain Hospital.
“We built a precision diagnosis and treatment model for brain-function diseases that spans individuals, disease types and regions,” said Bian Yawen, Lingxiyun’s chief operating officer.
Huashan Hospital leads the iBRAIN EEG Data Alliance, which brings together 16 hospitals and about 1,000 high-quality intracranial EEG cases. The alliance uses a “usable but not copyable” data-sharing model that lets hospitals contribute data safely without exposing patient privacy. Standardized software ensures different devices output data in a common format.
“No matter what hardware it targets, when scientists see the data they know what happened at that time,” said Wu Zehan, a neurosurgeon at Huashan Hospital.
Three Hurdles to Market
The road from research to market runs through three gates, the Economic Daily report notes: concept validation, clinical trials and registration approval.
The first gate is concept validation. The Sinan BCI Intelligent Super Incubator runs a platform aimed at projects stuck between paper and prototype. “We dig out early-stage projects that have not yet formed companies; after proving they have industrialization potential, we send them to the incubator for cultivation,” said executive general manager Gao Zhijun. In its first phase, the platform reviewed more than 50 projects, with 14 passing concept validation and cumulative financing exceeding 1 billion yuan.
The second gate is clinical trials, which suffer from long cycles, slow enrollment and the difficulty of coordinating multiple centers. Huashan Hospital’s clinical transformation center focuses on invasive and non-invasive BCI trials and has built a dedicated research ward integrating patient care, rehabilitation, clinical research and long-term follow-up.
The third gate is registration. Implantable BCI falls under the highest-risk Class III medical device category, requiring formal type testing before approval. The Shanghai Medical Device Testing Institute handles type testing for more than 90% of the nation’s implantable BCI products and led drafting of China’s first BCI medical device industry standard, with six national standards under development.
A Policy-Backed Ecosystem Takes Shape
National policy has provided strong tailwinds. The 15th Five-Year Plan explicitly calls for promoting BCI as a new economic growth point, and the technology appeared in the 2026 Government Work Report for the first time. Earlier, in July 2025, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and seven other departments released implementation opinions on promoting the BCI industry, targeting key technology breakthroughs by 2027.
Capital has followed. As of June 2026, Shanghai’s BCI sector had recorded 16 financing events, representing 59.26% of the national total, with financing of about 2.117 billion yuan (38.94% of the national total), according to the Economic Daily report. Boruikang separately submitted an IPO application to Shanghai’s STAR Market in June, seeking to raise 2.5 billion yuan—potentially becoming the A-share market’s first listed BCI company. An analysis by Tencent News’s Dingjiao One noted that domestic BCI financing in the first quarter of 2026 alone reached 38 billion yuan, exceeding all of 2025.
Payment systems are beginning to adapt. In May 2026, Shanghai’s “Huhuibao” inclusive insurance product became the first city-level plan to cover BCI surgical consumables, and Guangdong later included BCI-related services in its medical service pricing items. Government-guided prices for invasive BCI implantation cluster around 6,000 to 6,600 yuan per session, with non-invasive adaptation fees around 960 yuan—though the device consumables remain the larger cost.
What’s Next
Boruikang has set out an ambitious three-to-five-year plan. In a separate Xinhua interview, product director Wang Yujing said the company will push large-scale clinical application of its certified invasive product, expand indications toward stroke, epilepsy and depression, and iterate toward smaller, higher-throughput devices capable of finer control and even language decoding.
Yet officials are tempering expectations. “With more projects advancing to clinical validation, product registration and market application stages, the real test has just begun,” Wang Zhuoyao said. “How many projects and products can truly ‘run out’ in the end is something we need to keep watching.”
The technology is also advancing beyond Shanghai. At the Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a 24-member team led by researcher Zhang Qiang has developed an implantable hydrogel neural probe, reported by Guangming Net, that enables simultaneous monitoring and regulation of brain signals, offering a new path for treating chronic pain, stroke and epilepsy.
Even with approvals secured and payment channels opening, the gap between a registered product and widespread clinical adoption remains wide. Boruikang’s financials underscore the challenge: its 2025 revenue topped 100 million yuan but came almost entirely from non-invasive products, while its cumulative losses reached roughly 328 million yuan from 2023 to 2025. The company expects profitability only in 2029 or 2030. For China’s BCI ambitions, the proof will lie less in certificates than in how many patients the technology actually reaches—and at what cost.