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The BCI Briefing

Research3 min read

Typing with both hands, decoded from motor cortex

Two people with tetraplegia typed on a QWERTY layout by attempting finger movements. The faster reached 110 characters a minute with 1.6% of words wrong.

ByThe BCI Briefing

Evidence class: Fact

The short version

  • Two BrainGate2 participants, one with ALS and one with spinal cord injury, typed by attempting the finger movements of touch typing.
  • The faster reached 110 characters, about 22 words, a minute with 1.6% of words wrong, after as few as 30 calibration sentences.
  • Published online in March, and in print in the October issue of Nature Neuroscience, which is given over to neurotechnology.

A team from Massachusetts General Hospital, Brown University, UC Davis and Stanford assigned the keys of a QWERTY layout to attempted movements of the fingers of both hands, decoded those movements from arrays in motor cortex and corrected whole sentences with a language model.

The faster participant reached 110 characters a minute with a word error rate of 1.6%; the other typed more slowly. Decoded handwriting, the previous best route from hand movement to text, had reached 90 characters a minute in 2021.

How solid is this

Peer reviewed, in Nature Neuroscience (Jude et al., 2026). The figures are from the abstract; the open full text identifies which participant reached the top rate. Only two people took part, on investigational arrays wired through the skull, and the abstract gives a top rate without an average. Published online on 16 March and added to this site on 19 October.

Peer reviewed. Published in a journal after independent expert review. The strongest routine form of scientific evidence, though single studies still need replication.

What to watch

  1. 01Average rates over weeks of use, outside sessions run by researchers.
  2. 02The same decoding on a fully implanted system.

This technology remains experimental and is not an established treatment. Access is limited to registered clinical studies.

Sources

  1. 01

    Jude JJ et al. Nat Neurosci 2026;29(10):2613–2622 (opens in a new tab)

    Peer reviewedNature Neuroscience16 Mar 2026Checked against source 19 Oct 2026

    DOI 10.1038/s41593-026-02218-y

  2. 02

    Willett FR et al. Nature 2021;593(7858):249–254 (opens in a new tab)

    Peer reviewedNature12 May 2021Checked against source 3 Oct 2026

    DOI 10.1038/s41586-021-03506-2

  3. 03

    Willsey MS et al. Nat Med 2025;31(1):96–104 (opens in a new tab)

    Peer reviewedNature Medicine20 Jan 2025Checked against source 3 Oct 2026

    DOI 10.1038/s41591-024-03341-8

  4. 04

    ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00912041 (opens in a new tab)

    Clinical registryClinicalTrials.gov1 Jun 2026Checked against source 26 Oct 2026

    Registry record last updated 2026-06-01.