Edward Chang and his colleagues at UCSF think they’ve found a way to give a voice to people with speech paralysis.
One of the great tragedies of anarthria, the loss of speech, is that many people who suffer the condition—following, say, a stroke—can still think clearly. They just can’t express themselves the way most of us do, with words. Especially if they’re also paralyzed and can’t type out their thoughts on a tablet.
In other words, every fourth phrase the users were thinking… ended up wrong on the screen. That’s almost as if every fourth line of text you wrote in an email conversation just ended up being automatically rewritten as gibberish. The Chang Lab made headlines three years ago when it demoed its BrainNet BCI. In the experiment, two volunteers wore electroencephalogram electrodes on their heads—the kind neurologists use to detect epilepsy. Unlike older, cruder BCIs, BrainNet did not require invasive surgery to implant sensors directly into the brain.The volunteers silently concentrated on certain simple thoughts.
Chang and his teammates, including UCSF neuroscientists Sean Metzger and David Moses, taught the subject the NATO phonetic alphabet. “Alpha” for A. “Bravo” for B. “Charlie” for C.. They instructed the volunteer to spell out their thoughts by thinking of each letter’s NATO code word.The BCI read the brain waves. An algorithm did its best to match the waves to a 1,152-word dictionary.
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