Two technologies that have been “coming soon” for the better part of a decade are finally arriving. Not in a press-release sense. In a you-can-follow-real-people-using-them-daily sense.
Exoskeletons and brain-computer interfaces take fundamentally different approaches to the same problem: what do you do when the body’s own systems for mobility and communication have been disrupted? The exoskeleton augments from the outside. The BCI connects from inside the nervous system. Both are crossing the threshold from laboratory and clinical settings into the lives of actual people.
Here’s where they actually are in 2026, what the realistic near-term picture looks like, and the harder questions around access and ethics that don’t get asked enough.
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Get the newsletterExoskeletons: from clinic to consumer
The exoskeleton market has been generating headlines since the early 2010s. People with paraplegia standing up at press events. Clinical rehab footage of patients taking their first steps in a powered frame. The promise was enormous. The delivery timeline kept slipping.
In 2026 the market is growing, but more importantly, the nature of the products is changing. The shift from clinical rehabilitation device to consumer daily-use technology is genuinely beginning.
What happened at CES 2026 matters
Consumer Electronics Show is where technology makes its statement about where it’s going. CES is not a medical device conference. When RoboCT brought their GoGo Exoskeleton to CES 2026, they were making a deliberate statement: this is a consumer product.
The GoGo weighs 2.3 kilograms per side, excluding the battery, which works out to roughly 5 pounds on each leg, and RoboCT states an operational range of up to 25 kilometres. It’s AI-powered, with adaptive modes covering walking, standing and sitting, cadence assist and swing assist. The company’s stated uses include post-stroke gait recovery, stability for people with Parkinson’s, and everyday mobility support on stairs and uneven terrain (RoboCT CES 2026 announcement).
This is a deliberate move into the consumer market by an established clinical exoskeleton maker: RoboCT’s rehabilitation devices carry China’s NMPA Class II approval, FDA registration and CE certification. Consumer pricing and Canadian availability have not been announced. But the trajectory has changed.
Wandercraft’s Eve: the self-balancing difference
Wandercraft raised USD 75 million in a Series D, announced 11 June 2025 to bring their self-balancing personal exoskeleton, Eve, to market in 2026. The self-balancing piece is the technical breakthrough that expands the eligible population significantly.
Most exoskeleton designs require the user to have some residual balance function. They augment existing balance, they don’t replace it. Eve manages balance autonomously, which means people with conditions that have eliminated balance function entirely become potential users. Eve is targeting daily mobility support, not rehabilitation exercise. The distinction matters, daily use means it needs to work in real-world conditions, not just in structured clinical environments.
What rehabilitation-grade exoskeletons are doing now
Ekso Bionics, ReWalk, and Cyberdyne’s HAL system are the clinical leaders. They’re used in rehabilitation hospitals across Canada and internationally for gait training after SCI, stroke, and neurological conditions. The evidence for clinical rehabilitation exoskeletons includes improved walking endurance, reduced spasticity, and psychological benefits of regaining upright posture.
These aren’t consumer products. But they’re the ground-level technology that consumer exoskeletons are descending from. If you’re in or near a rehabilitation program, it’s worth asking whether your facility uses robotic gait training and whether you’re a candidate.
The honest limitations
Battery life on current devices is measured in hours of active use, enough for many daily routines and not enough for others. Weight, even a few kilograms, is a consideration for users with very limited upper body strength. Cost remains very high, varies enormously between a consumer assistive wearable and a full self-balancing exoskeleton, and manufacturers rarely publish Canadian prices; treat any specific figure you read as unconfirmed until a Canadian dealer quotes you. Insurance and provincial assistive technology program coverage is uncertain and inconsistent.
The technology is real and it’s advancing. It isn’t a solution for everyone with a mobility disability, and anyone who tells you it is should be read with caution.
Brain-computer interfaces: the story the headlines aren’t fully telling
The BCI story in popular media has been almost entirely about Neuralink. That’s understandable, Neuralink has the most prominent founder and the most media-friendly narrative. But it’s also limiting, because what Synchron is doing is in some ways more immediately relevant and more clinically cautious.
Neuralink: what’s actually happening
Neuralink’s N1 implant is a fully implanted BCI. Surgically placed in the brain by a robot (the R1 surgical robot, also Neuralink’s), it reads brain signals and transmits them wirelessly to external devices.
The PRIME study, Neuralink’s first human trial, has been running since early 2024 and has expanded internationally. The GB-PRIME study extended to the UK in 2025: UCL reported the first UK patient controlling a computer within hours of surgery, and UCLH confirmed seven UK participants received implants between October and December 2025.
The ALS patient story is the one that matters most
Brad Smith, an ALS patient who enrolled in the PRIME study, used his Neuralink implant for more than cursor control. He edited and narrated a YouTube video entirely through brain signals, with a synthetic voice built from recordings made before ALS took his speech (ScienceAlert). These weren’t lab demonstrations. They were real tasks, at home, using the device as a daily tool.
This is the transition. BCIs as research instruments vs. BCIs as tools people actually use in their lives.
Neuralink’s stated longer-term aims include restoring vision through a separate device that interfaces with the visual cortex, and restoring speech through neural decoding of intended speech signals. The trials themselves have gone international: Health Canada approved the CAN-PRIME study, and a UAE-PRIME study is recruiting in Abu Dhabi.
The surgical requirement is real. This is open brain surgery. The risk profile is not trivial, and for the current trial population, people with ALS and high-level SCI who’ve lost most or all motor function, the risk/benefit calculation looks different than it would for the general population. The appropriate question isn’t “should people with disabilities get this” in the abstract. It’s whether an individual’s specific situation makes the trade-off rational.
Synchron and the Stentrode: less invasive, more accessible now
Synchron’s approach is different and arguably more clinically cautious.
The Stentrode is an endovascular BCI, it’s inserted through a blood vessel in the neck and travels to the motor cortex, where it sits inside the blood vessel adjacent to the brain rather than in brain tissue. No open brain surgery required. This significantly reduces the surgical risk profile.
In 2025, Synchron demonstrated its system working with Nvidia’s Holoscan AI platform and an Apple Vision Pro headset, with an ALS patient in Melbourne controlling lights, music and appliances by thought (demonstration coverage). Separately, Apple built brain-computer interface support into its devices, and a Stentrode user controlled an iPad by thought (MobiHealthNews). The system interprets neural signals, the AI processes and refines them, and the headset or tablet provides the interface layer.
There are two trials here and they are worth keeping apart. The first-in-human SWITCH study ran with four participants and was published in JAMA Neurology. The larger US COMMAND study ran with six participants over a 12-month evaluation period, and reported no device-related serious adverse events resulting in death or permanent increased disability, with the device accurately deployed and reaching target motor cortex coverage in all six (COMMAND study results, September 2024). That is a meaningful safety signal, and it is an early-feasibility one: six people, one year.
Synchron is further behind Neuralink in terms of trial scale and public visibility, but the lower surgical barrier is significant. For people who might benefit from BCI technology but for whom open brain surgery is a threshold they won’t cross, Synchron’s approach changes the calculus.
Non-invasive BCI: where it stands
EEG-based BCIs, systems that read brain activity through electrodes on the scalp without any surgery, have existed for decades. They’re slower and less precise than implanted systems. They’re also available now, accessible without surgery, and improving with AI processing.
CTRL-labs, a startup Meta acquired in 2019, developed a non-invasive band that reads the electrical activity of motor neurons at the wrist. It’s not as capable as implanted BCIs for complex control tasks, but for simpler device interactions, controlling a cursor, navigating menus, some game control, it works. Meta’s positioning of this as a mainstream computing interface (not just an accessibility tool) has implications for how widely it gets developed and deployed.
The questions that need to be asked
Both of these technologies are being developed primarily by well-funded private companies with profit motives. That’s not a reason to dismiss them, private companies built the power wheelchair too. But it is a reason to ask questions that the press releases don’t answer.
Who owns your brain data?
An implanted BCI generates continuous neural data. That data is commercially valuable in ways that are only beginning to be understood. The terms of service for what Neuralink can do with the neural data of trial participants are not fully public. This is not a hypothetical privacy concern. It’s a question that regulators are actively grappling with and that disability advocates are raising explicitly.
What happens when the company’s funding changes?
You’ve had a device implanted in your brain. The company that makes it experiences financial difficulty, gets acquired, or pivots. What happens to your device’s software, its support, its continued function? This is not an abstract question, it’s the same question that applies to any critical medical device, but the brain-interface dimension makes the stakes higher.
Who has access?
Clinical trials currently reach a small number of people with the most severe disability presentations, in a handful of countries, at institutions with the resources to participate. The path from “works in trial” to “accessible to people with disabilities who need it” involves cost, insurance coverage, clinical training, and regulatory approval processes that will take years. The people who need this technology most urgently are not in a position to wait years.
Does the disability community want this?
BCIs are sometimes framed in popular coverage as obviously desirable for people with disabilities, a restoration of lost function. But the disability community’s relationship with “cure” framing is complicated, and for good reason. Not every person with a disability experiences their disability as something to be overcome. The social model of disability locates the problem in barriers, not in bodies. BCIs change bodies. That’s a meaningful conversation that should be happening with the community, not just about them.
What to watch
Follow Neuralink and Synchron trial updates, both publish regular updates and patient stories are increasingly public. Follow Wandercraft’s Eve launch timeline. Watch for Canadian regulatory approval processes, which lag US timelines by months to years.
The disability technology media worth following in this space: New Mobility (newmobility.com), Disability Scoop, and the WHILL and LUCI community channels for mobility device news.
The coming five years in mobility technology will produce more change than the previous fifty. Following it closely means being better positioned to advocate for access when it matters.
Sources
- RoboCT, GoGo Exoskeleton series launch at CES 2026 (PR Newswire, 5 January 2026)
- Wandercraft, Series D announcement (11 June 2025)
- UCL News, first UK Neuralink patient (October 2025)
- UCLH, seven GB-PRIME participants
- Neuralink, CAN-PRIME study launch
- ScienceAlert, Neuralink patient makes YouTube video with brain implant
- Synchron, SWITCH trial publication in JAMA Neurology (January 2023)
- Synchron, COMMAND study results (September 2024)
- MacTech, Synchron demo with Nvidia Holoscan and Apple Vision Pro (March 2025)
- MobiHealthNews, ALS patient controls iPad by thought
Living Unlimited Team
