• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

New Brain Implant Translates Imagined Speech In Real Time With Best Accuracy Yet

May 15, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

A new tool developed by bioengineers at Caltech has been shown to be the best yet at translating brain signals generated from internal speech. While it has only been tested in two patients so far, with further development the technology could allow people who are unable to speak to communicate using only their thoughts.

Advertisement

Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) are already doing incredible things. Versions of these systems, which link the brain’s electrical signals to an output device that seeks to either replace or restore a function in the body, have been used to help paralyzed patients walk and, in the case of Neuralink’s first experimental subject, control a computer “telepathically”.

Advertisement

One of the major use cases of this technology is in assisting communication. For people who cannot speak – due to a neurological disease or brain injury, for example – BMIs can allow them to regain their voice.

Such devices, like the one famously used by the late Stephen Hawking, have some limitations. One is that it’s difficult to capture the natural rhythm of speech – though scientists are working on that, with a little help from Pink Floyd. Another is that a lot of speech BMIs require the user to attempt to say words out loud, which is not possible for everyone. The ideal solution would be to find a way of decoding internal speech, so someone would only have to imagine saying a word. Some advances in this area have been made, but it’s proven very challenging and results have been mixed.

Now, the team at Caltech has developed a system that has the potential to decode internal speech with a higher degree of accuracy than ever before.

Microelectrode arrays were implanted into the brains of two male patients with tetraplegia (paralysis of all four limbs), a 33-year-old and a 39-year-old. The team targeted the primary somatosensory cortex and the supramarginal gyrus (SMG), a region of the brain that hasn’t been explored in previous speech BMI studies.

Advertisement

The interface was trained on six real words (battlefield, cowboy, python, spoon, swimming, telephone) and two made-up words (“nifzig”, “bindip”), to see whether the words needed to have meanings for the system to work effectively. The participants were either shown each word on a screen or had the word spoken to them, before they were then asked to imagine saying the same word for 1.5 seconds. They were subsequently asked to say the word out loud.

Although these two participants were physically able to speak, “This technology would be particularly useful for people that have no means of movement anymore,” first author Sarah Wandelt told Nature News. “For instance, we can think about a condition like locked-in syndrome.”

The BMI allowed the researchers to decode, in real-time, the activity in the SMG as the participants were thinking of each word. For one participant, the accuracy reached 79 percent, “only slightly less accurate than the decoding of vocalized speech,” Wandelt and co-author David Bjånes explain in a briefing on their work; for the other participant, it was 23 percent.

Advertisement

The technology will need to be further refined and tested on a larger group of people using more words, but the study does demonstrate that the SMG is a promising brain region to target.

“Even if this result could not be replicated in the second participant, this study is important because it is to my knowledge the first achievement of a real-time speech brain-computer interface based on single unit recordings in the SMG,” commented Blaise Yvert of The Grenoble Institute of Neuroscience, who was not involved in the study.

Next, the team wants to find out if the BMI can distinguish between letters of the alphabet, and Wandelt and Bjånes also suggest that decoding individual sound units of speech, called phonemes, could be a promising approach.

“This proof-of-concept study of high-performance decoding of internal speech will certainly be of great interest to researchers working to push the boundaries of BMIs and other therapeutic devices for people who can no longer speak,” added Giacomo Ariani, the paper’s Associate Editor.

Advertisement

The study is published in the journal Nature Human Behavior. 

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Bolivian president calls for global debt relief for poor countries
  2. Five Seasons Ventures pulls in €180M fund to tackle human health and climate via FoodTech
  3. Humanity’s Journey To A Metal-Rich Asteroid Launches Today. Here’s How To Watch
  4. Ancient DNA Reveals People Caught Leprosy From Adorable Woodland Critters In Medieval England

Source Link: New Brain Implant Translates Imagined Speech In Real Time With Best Accuracy Yet

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • DNA From Greenland Sled Dogs – Maybe The World’s Oldest Breed – Reveals 1,000 Years Of Arctic History
  • Why Doesn’t Moonrise Shift By The Same Amount Each Night?
  • Moa De-Extinction, Fashionable Chimps, And Robot Surgery – No Human Required
  • “Human”: Powerful New Images Mark The Most Scientifically Accurate “Hyper-Real 3D Models Of Human Species Ever”
  • Did We Accidentally Leave Life On The Moon In 2019 – And Could We Revive It?
  • 1.8 Million Years Ago, Two Extinct Humans Had One Of The Gnarliest Deaths In History
  • “Powerful Image” Of One Of The World’s Rarest Tigers Exposes The Real Danger In Taman Negara
  • Evolution, Domestication, And A Lot Of Very Good Boys: How Wolves Became Dogs
  • Why Do Orcas Have White Spots Near Their Eyes?
  • Tomb Of First King Of Ancient Maya City Discovered In Belize
  • The Real Reason The Tip Of Your Tape Measure Wiggles Like That
  • The “Haunting” Last Message From NASA’s Opportunity Rover, Sent From Inside A Planet-Wide Storm
  • Adorable Video Proves Not All Gorillas Hate The Rain. It Might Even Win One A Mate
  • 5,000-Year-Old Rock Art May Show One Of Ancient Egypt’s First Rulers
  • Alzheimer’s-Linked Protein Levels “20 Times Higher” In Newborn Babies – What Does This Mean?
  • Americans Were Asked If They Thought Civil War Was Coming. The Results Were Unexpected
  • Voyager 1 & 2 Could Be Detected From Almost A Light-Year Away With Our Current Technology
  • Dams Have Nudged Earth’s Poles By Over 1 Meter In The Past 200 Years
  • This Sugar Could Be A Cure For Male Pattern Baldness – And It’s Been In Our Bodies All Along
  • “Cosmic Immigrants”: Daytime Star Seen In 1604 May Be An “Alien Type Ia Supernova”
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version