Musk's biggest rival! Brain-computer interface company Synchron implants patients to help them send tweets

Recently, brain-computer interface company Synchron announced that Philip O'Keefe, a patient with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), implanted in the Stentrode brain-computer interface, was the first person to message directly on social media Twitter through BCI, becoming the first person to directly deliver information to the world on social media.

Synchron, which focuses on brain-computer interface research and development, is known as Musk's biggest rival. The Stentrode motor nerve prosthesis it previously developed has been approved by the FDA's Investigational Device Exemption (IDE).

Stentrode consists of a tiny stent that expands inside a blood vessel to hold it in place, and then installs 16 tiny sensors on it for brain activity, much like a traditional cerebrovascular stent. The device is by far the only implantable brain-computer interface that does not require open brain surgery.

According to Discovery data from Smart Bud, as of the latest, Synchron and its affiliates have filed 22 patent applications in 126 countries.