Among the great advances that are being achieved in the 21st century is the possibility of giving people with speech or movement problems the ability to function in their day to day. What would have seemed like science fiction a few decades ago is now a reality. You just have to see devices like the famous Neuralink by Elon Musk. Most of them consist of algorithms that translate the brain activity in movements. Thus, someone who cannot speak would be able to do so, for example, by move a cursor over a screen with letters. But this is a slow process. For this reason, a new project is especially interesting, in which they have achieved that a patient can speak with brain waves.
Those responsible for this great milestone are scientists from the University of California San Francisco. At the moment, they have only tested their device with one patient, whose evolution is reported in a study in The New England Journal of Medicine.
However, they plan to bring it to more people. There are many patients who, either by accidents or illnesses, have lost the ability to move and talk. Thanks to this, they could communicate with the people around them and, in this way, make their life a little more normal.
The man who could speak with brain waves
To carry out this study, the authors first placed electrodes to measure the brain waves of patients with intact speech, subjected to surgical interventions.
The goal was to decode the signals that control the vocal tract and analyze patterns for predicting words. But for the next step they did need patients with difficulty speaking and moving
So they appealed for volunteers. The first one who came to his call and who met the requirements was a 36-year-old man, who suffered a stroke at 20. As a result, he had lost the ability to speak clearly. Furthermore, the movements of his head, neck, and limbs were severely limited. Of course, his cognitive abilities remained intact. Until then, he had communicated using a device attached to a baseball cap, which allowed him to select letters using a pointer. He wasn’t even doing it through mind control from companies like Neuralink. It was directly pointing at the screen physically, as seen in the video below.
When he learned about the possibility of speaking with brain waves directly, using whole words and without pointers, he wanted be part of the project. And so it was, although they still had a few months of work ahead of them.
The training begins
During the training phase to speak with brain waves, you were given a list of 50 everyday words, such as “water”, “good” or “family”. Later, it was implanted in his speech cerebral cortex a high-density electrode.
Thanks to him, they were able to measure the activity in this brain region during 48 sessions in which he was trying to say the previous words. He couldn’t say them, but the simple attempt was registered on the implant.
They then used the artificial intelligence to design an algorithm capable of relating this brain activity to words, to the point of forming sentences, which would be written directly on a screen.
It only remained to test if everything had worked. To do this, they asked him questions such as: “How are you today?” or “Do you want some water?” The patient was able to answer “I am very well” for the first and “no, thank you, I am not thirsty” for the second.
It was something like no other. Neither Neuralink nor any other brain-machine interface they had accomplished something like that. It is true that the sentences were not always perfect. In fact, the precision in the words was of a 75%. However, a text correction system simple, similar to that used by mobile phones, was able to correct the errors, increasing that 75% much more.
Another strong point is that, when speaking with brain waves directly, the process was much faster than going from letter to letter or moving a cursor. Specifically, some 18 words per minute. Faced with this success, which will make the patient’s life much easier, they hope to be able to try it out with other people. Undoubtedly, these advances in science are all a hymn to hope.