Image from UC Davis Health via YouTube
An amazing new brain-computer interface (BCI) has helped a man who has lost the ability to speak to use his own voice to communicate his thoughts aloud.
Scientists at the University of California, Davis have developed a brain chip that can interpret brain signals and have a computer “read” them aloud in real time.
The chip has enabled 45-year-old Casey Harrell, whose speech is slurred due to the loss of muscle control that characterizes amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s disease, to go from being very difficult to understand to communicating through a computer voice.
Additionally, the voice assistant software connected to Harrell’s BCI is designed to resemble the way he sounded before the disease began, using artificial intelligence trained on samples of his pre-ALS voice.
Implanted last summer in the left precentral gyrus, the region of the brain responsible for speech, the BCI’s 256 electrodes record activity in the area and essentially convert it into text that is then read aloud by an AI voice assistant a few seconds later.
As Sergei Stavisky, a neuroprosthetics expert at the University of California, Davis, explained in a press release, the chip does this by “translating patterns of brain activity into phonemes (such as syllables or units of speech) and then into the words they are trying to say.”
While it’s far from the first device to help people with diseases such as ALS communicate (Richard Hawking famously used a specialized Intel microprocessing computer to communicate with him after he underwent emergency tracheotomy surgery in 1985 that lost his ability to speak), the Davis scientists say it will go even further because the BCI’s translation algorithms are built with the natural flow of conversation in mind.
“Previous voice BCI systems frequently produced word errors,” explains neurosurgeon David Brandman of the University of California, Davis, lead investigator on the experiment and co-author of the study published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine. “This made it difficult for users to be understood consistently, creating a barrier to communication.”
“Our goal was to develop a system that would allow someone to be understood whenever they wanted to speak,” Brandman continued.
This isn’t the only brain chip that has helped ALS patients restore their communication skills: last year, for example, a 36-year-old German man who was paralyzed by ALS was implanted with a BCI and was able to spell out messages and immediately ask for a beer.
More on brain chips: Connecting brain implants to control VR headsets
