Communicating with the Speechless - Revolutionary neuroprosthesis that can decode speech

Neurological disorders like Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, Stroke, Brain Injury, and many more have been documented to leave the survivor in a state without being able to communicate verbally. Scientists have always been on the spree of finding a way to give a voice to those speechless. One example is the famous scientist Stephen Hawking who suffered from ALS and lost the ability to speak at a young age. With high-tech devices, he was able to turn his thoughts into words, the output of which is in the form of a voice through his computer. But the device that we are talking about today is something different, as it grabs the words and sentences directly from the brain.

In this study, a group of scientists from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), developed a neuroprosthesis that can decode speech when implanted into the brain. The subject on whom this study was done had suffered from a stroke at a young age, leaving him with complete paralysis as well as inability to articulate words into speech, a condition called Anarthria. In Anarthria, the speech centers in the brain are intact and a person can understand what is being said to him but is unable to articulate words and produce vocalization properly.

With this device, once implanted in the brain, as and when the person attempts to speak, the signals from the brain were taken directly and fed into a neural processing system, which uses a complex algorithm and finally displays in texts about what the person is saying. This is indeed a revolutionary way of restoring communicability by tapping directly into the brain’s natural speech mechanism.

In this experiment, the researchers were able to decode about 15.2 words on an average per minute, and the error rate was 25.6%. However, with further improvements, the rate of error is expected to reduce and the decoding rate higher.

This study titled "Neuroprosthesis for Decoding Speech in a Paralyzed Person with Anarthria" is indeed a milestone in the technology dealing with speech and communication for those who lost the ability to do the same. A video summary of the same can be seen here as well.