Succeeded in communicating by outputting more than 1000 words with 'implant that reads brain waves'



It was reported that a man with a paralysis of the body and a speech disorder used an ``implant that reads brain waves and converts them into sentences,'' enabling real-time communication by sentences by manipulating a total of 1152 words. .

Generalizable spelling using a speech neuroprosthesis in an individual with severe limb and vocal paralysis | Nature Communications

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-33611-3

Brainwave-Reading Implant Helps Paralyzed Man Who Can't Speak Spell Out 1,150 Words : ScienceAlert
https://www.sciencealert.com/brainwave-reading-implant-helps-paralyzed-man-who-cant-speak-spell-out-1150-words

In 2021, a research team at the University of California, San Francisco announced a study in collaboration with Facebook to ``read the thoughts of subjects who have lost the ability to speak with an implant embedded in the brain''.

Facebook succeeds in outputting thoughts to a computer in real time - GIGAZINE



A patient called 'BRAVO1 (Brain-Computer Interface Restoration of Arm and Voice trial-1)' who participated in the study lost his ability to speak after suffering a stroke at the age of 20, and his body became immobile due to paralysis. I was. Therefore, he usually communicates words by touching the keyboard on the screen with a pointer attached to the baseball cap.

The research team surgically implanted high-density electrodes over the motor language centers that control speech in the brain of BRAVO1, allowing them to detect electrical patterns through ports in the skull. BRAVO1 seems to be able to convey words by imagining key words representing the 26 letters of the alphabet in his head, and Sean Metzger, the lead author of the paper, said, 'If he wants to say' cat ' , ``charlie(c)-alpha(a)-tango(t)''.



The signal sent from the brain implant is output in real time to the computer screen after undergoing computer processing such as 'brain signal processing', 'speech detection', 'word classification' and 'language modeling'. At the time of its 2021 announcement, it focused on a limited vocabulary of 50 words.



In a new study, the research team succeeded in expanding the number of words that can be deciphered to 1152 words by training a classification and detection model with BRAVO1. This covers more than 85% of the words used in natural English sentences, and post-simulation showed that it can be expanded to 9000 words, which is comparable to the number of words used by many people in a year. BRAVO1 was able to output 29.4 characters per minute with a system using brain implants, and the median error rate was 6.13%.

The research team uses this system to communicate with BRAVO1, and Metzger said, ``We really enjoyed using the device because BRAVO1 can communicate with us quickly and easily with this system.'' increase.

When I asked BRAVO1 to talk about anything I liked in my research, I was able to learn about private things such as 'the food at the facility where I live is quite unpalatable.' BRAVO1 especially likes the word 'Anything is possible'.

in Science, Posted by log1h_ik