DARPA is currently funding projects that are betting chips implanted in the brains of soldiers will increase their battlefield performance and repair trauma in the brain after war, according to Fusion.
Although the chips are already being tested, DARPA requires up to five years before a prototype is developed and sent to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for approval, according to the International Business Times.
"Of the 2.5 million Americans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, 300,000 of them came home with traumatic brain injury," said journalist Annie Jacobsen. "DARPA initiated a series of programs to help cognitive functioning, to repair some of this damage. And those programs center around putting brain chips inside the tissue of the brain."
DARPA hopes to create a wireless device that utilizes implantable probes to monitor soldier health using electric impulses and speed up healing through nerve stimulation, according to the Daily Mail.
In addition to improved battlefield performance and brain healing, DARPA also hopes to use the chip implants to further understand and develop artificial intelligence and achieve higher-level reasoning in machines to a degree that rivals that in humans.
"When you see all of these brain mapping programs going on, many scientists wonder whether this will [be what it takes] to break that long-sought barrier of AI," said Jacobsen.
