Using BrainGate, the world’s most advanced brain-computer interface, a woman with quadriplegia has used a mind-controlled robot arm to serve herself coffee — an act she hasn’t been able to perform for 15 years. I strongly suggest you watch the video below — the expression on her face at the end is really quite beautiful.

BrainGate, which is being developed by a team of American neuroscientists from Brown and Stanford universities, and is currently undergoing clinical trial, requires a computer chip to be implanted in the motor cortex of the patient. This chip (pictured below) uses its 100 electrodes to measure neural activity, which it then transmits to a computer for processing. Like all brain-computer interfaces, the user must train the software — basically, you just repeatedly think of an action, such as move my hand up, and the software eventually correlates this thought with your measured neural activity. Once this is done, you simply think of a movement, and the software moves the robot accordingly.

It’s also worth noting that the robotic arm itself is quite intelligent: It automatically grasps things that move into its hand, and it goes into “safety mode” if it hits an obstacle. I’m sure other advancements will be added to the arm in due course, too — imagine if it could automatically detect graspable objects; and it definitely would spare the user a lot of effort if the robot could automatically maneuver close to your mouth (or other pre-defined locations).

Moving forward, the researchers would like to miniaturize the system and make it wireless. You’ll notice in the video that both BrainGate users have fairly large boxes attached to their heads, which then tethers them to a computer — not ideal, but it should be rather easy to convert it to wireless (and who knows, maybe that box can be tucked behind your ear instead).

Last month we wrote about a similar technology that directly restores movement to a paralyzed arm, rather than using a robot arm. A brain-computer interface is still used, but the output is then fed back into a functional electrical stimulation (FES) device that’s wired into your arm muscles. The big difference, though, is that BrainGate is a very mature technology: The first BrainGate chip was implanted in a human back in 2004, after years of in-monkey testing — while the FES version is still trialing its tech on monkeys, meaning it’s probably at least 10 years behind BrainGate.

Between bionic eyes, the successful decoding of your thoughts by computers, and silicon chips that mimic the brain, and these recent brain-computer interface advances, things are definitely looking up for victims of paralysis and neurological diseases — and cyberpunk, bionic implant junkies like myself.

Read more at BrainGate or Nature (paywalled)