Regional reportWhere is it happening?
Australia / New Zealand
A small research base with an outsized clinical first: the first-in-human study of an endovascular BCI was run in Melbourne.
AcceleratingConfidence moderate
Research trajectory, from scholarly works by author country: +16% a year over the latest three years, 0% in the three before. Data as of 8 Oct 2026.
Field snapshot
- 89
- scholarly works in 2025
- 2% of the world count; 4% in 2019
- 50
- PubMed papers in 2025
- held as individual records
- 2
- registered studies open now
- 2 with an implanted interface
- 1
- company profiled
- in 1 country
- –
- disclosed in recorded rounds
- 0 rounds; a sample
- 0
- regulatory milestones recorded
- kept apart by type
Profiled companies at their headquarters, from the year each was founded.
1 marks on the companies layer in 2026, Australia / New Zealand. Hover a mark, or use the list.
Marks are records, not decoration. Country marks sit at the centre of the country, not at an institution. Mark area follows the count, so a few large countries dominate; use the region zoom to read the rest. 3 profiled companies have not disclosed a location and are not placed. 36 countries with a small number of works have no position recorded and are not drawn. Clinical counts come from ClinicalTrials.gov and under-count studies outside the United States.
Research momentum
Authors in Australia / New Zealand published 89 scholarly works on brain-computer interfaces in 2025, +35% on the year before. Over the latest three years output grew +16% a year, against 0% in the three years before; the world as a whole grew +23% a year.
| Year | Australia / New Zealand |
|---|---|
| 2010 | 10 |
| 2011 | 7 |
| 2012 | 11 |
| 2013 | 16 |
| 2014 | 22 |
| 2015 | 32 |
| 2016 | 28 |
| 2017 | 44 |
| 2018 | 40 |
| 2019 | 57 |
| 2020 | 57 |
| 2021 | 54 |
| 2022 | 57 |
| 2023 | 78 |
| 2024 | 66 |
| 2025 | 89 |
| 2026 | 69 |
| Country | 2025 | Growth a year | Trajectory |
|---|---|---|---|
| Australia | 75 | +13% | Accelerating |
| New Zealand | 14 | +41% | Emerging |
Countries with at least five works in 2025. A work with authors in several countries counts once in each.
Companies and initiatives
- Cochlear
Sydney, Australia · 1981
Maker of the Nucleus cochlear implant, the most widely used kind of neural prosthesis.
Neuroprosthetic
Clinical programmes
ClinicalTrials.gov lists 2 open studies with a site in Australia / New Zealand, 2 of them involving an implanted interface. 0 studies started in 2025.
- 27 May 2019SWITCHSynchron · NCT03834857Royal Melbourne HospitalCompleted
Capital
No funding round is recorded for a company headquartered here. Public grants, which fund much of the work in several regions, are not tracked yet.
Regulatory environment
The Therapeutic Goods Administration regulates medical devices in Australia. Trials are registered in the Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry, which we do not read yet.
Institutions in the corpus
Royal Melbourne Hospital
Melbourne, Australia
Institutions appear here because a profiled study or paper names them. It is not a ranking, and many active groups are missing.
Latest developments
Open questions and outlook
- Implanted BCIs used at homeHow soon is everyday home use the norm for study participants, not the exception?Now · confidence high
- Less invasive routes to the brainHow much function can be delivered without opening the dura, or the skull?3–5 years · confidence moderate
Forward-looking judgements by The BCI Briefing, with their reasoning on the Trends page. Uncertain by nature.
What we cannot see here
- We profile one company headquartered here, a maker of hearing implants, and no BCI company. Companies that began in Australia and moved their headquarters abroad are counted where they are based today.
- A first-in-human study of a cortical interface for brain tumour surgery began in Melbourne in 2026. Its sponsor, Coherence Neuro, is profiled as a San Francisco company that runs the study through an Australian subsidiary.
- Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry is not connected. Not yet connected.
Known to us, not yet verified
- Synchron's Australian operations and studies
- Carbon Cybernetics
- Bionic Vision Technologies
- Saluda Medical (closed-loop spinal cord stimulation)
Leads are pointers for us to check: a study sponsor in a registry, a name in a report. They say nothing yet about what an organisation does, and none is counted anywhere on this site until it has a profile with sources.
Sources cited for this region’s profiles are in English.