Fluent Subscalp BCI

Fluent is a University of Melbourne spinout developing a subscalp speech brain-computer interface — a device that sits beneath the scalp but outside the skull, deliberately trading maximum signal fidelity for a dramatically lower surgical risk profile than fully intracortical systems. That places it in a tier below ECoG and intracortical approaches but potentially well above scalp EEG in both signal quality and practical deployability. In preliminary human testing at St Vincent's Hospital Melbourne, a 144-electrode array cap placed over the motor cortex allowed an AI model to correctly identify a target phrase from a pool of 128 options with 96% accuracy; participants wore the cap while speaking, miming words, and imagining different phrases. Co-founder Dr. Tim Mahoney reports that signals captured beneath the skull are comparable to those captured outside it — a claim not yet independently replicated in peer-reviewed form.