It's Accessibility Day at Apple. Alongside new features aimed at making its devices easier for everyone to use, the manufacturer also revealed a long-term project that will allow people with severe motor disabilities to control a Mac or iPhone with their minds. Apple is adapting its Switch Control protocol to brain-machine interfaces (BMIs), with the ambition of making it a recognized industry standard.
Apple is testing brain implants
The Switch Control protocol is integrated into iOS, iPadOS, and VisionOS; the hope is to eventually make it an industry-wide standard. Switch Control allows you to control an iPhone, iPad, or even the Vision Pro mixed reality headset using an external device—not a mouse or keyboard, but a brain implant.
To demonstrate the feasibility of this technology, Apple is collaborating with Synchron, a startup developing a brain implant. Called the Stentrode, it's a stent-like device inserted into a vein above the motor cortex. The device captures neural signals and translates them into simple actions, such as selecting icons on the screen.
Synchron unveiled last summer a test of its implant with a patient suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). He was able to use a Vision Pro to play Solitaire, watch videos, and send text messages. These seemingly simple uses are impossible to achieve when you have ALS: the muscles gradually weaken, making it impossible to control the visionOS interface with your hands.
Mark Jackson, the patient who was able to experiment with this technology, explains that the controls remain slow and less precise than with a mouse or touchscreen. For now, implants like Synchron's must trick the iPhone into thinking they are conventional peripherals, like a mouse or joystick, which limits their capabilities. It's actually a software layer that simulates a mouse.
Apple wants to provide a solution with its Switch Control, a software gateway specifically designed for BMI interfaces, which will open the way to much more fluid third-party applications.
When we talk about BMI, it's hard not to mention Neuralink, which benefits, for better or for worse, from the notoriety of Elon Musk. The N1 implant developed by the startup can capture much more data than the Stentrode thanks to more than 1,000 electrodes (compared to 16 for Synchron) and their integration directly into the brain.
In this way, guinea pigs equipped with the N1 are able to perform more advanced actions, such as moving a cursor by thought as quickly, or even more quickly, than with a conventional mouse.
Source: WSJ
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