Using an amazing new brain-computer interface (BCI), a man who'd lost the ability to speak is now able to communicate his thoughts out loud using his own voice.
Scientists at the University of California, Davis have developed a brain chip that can interpret brain signals and have them be "read" aloud by a computer in real time.
Using this chip, 45-year-old Casey Harrell, whose speech is slurred from the muscle control loss that characterizes amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gehrig's disease, went from being very difficult to understand to communicating in a computerized voice.
What's more: the voice assistant software connected to Harrell's BCI is designed to sound like his voice before the disease took hold using artificial intelligence trained with audio samples of him pre-ALS.
Implanted last summer in the left precentral gyrus, the brain region responsible for speech, the BCI's 256 electrodes record the area's activity and essentially convert it into text that's then read aloud by the AI voice assistant mere seconds later.
As UC Davis neuroprosthesis expert Sergey Stavisky explained in a press release, the chip does so by "translating those patterns of brain activity into a phoneme — like a syllable or the unit of speech — and then the words they’re trying to say."
Though it's far from the first device that helps people with diseases like ALS to communicate — Stephen Hawking famously used a specialized microprocessing computer powered by Intel to talk after losing the ability to speak following an emergency tracheotomy in 1985 — Davis scientists say their BCI functions even better because its translation algorithm was built with natural speech flow in mind.
"Previous speech BCI systems had frequent word errors," explained UC Davis neurosurgeon David Brandman, the principal investigator in the experiment and the co-senior author of the study published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine. "This made it difficult for the user to be understood consistently and was a barrier to communication."
"Our objective," Brandman continued, "was to develop a system that empowered someone to be understood whenever they wanted to speak."
It's not the only brain chip that has helped an ALS patient regain their ability to communicate. Last year, for instance, a 36-year-old German man, who was fully paralyzed by the condition, had a BCI implanted — and immediately asked for a beer when it allowed him to spell out messages.
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