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PARIS: Paralyzed man who cannot speak or write was able to spell over 1,000 words using a neuroprosthesis that translates it brain waves into complete sentences, US researchers said on Tuesday.
“Anything is possible” was one of the man’s favorite phrases, said first author of a new study on the research, Sean Metzger of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
Last year, a team of UC San Francisco researchers showed that A Brain transplant It’s called a brain-computer interface that can translate 50 very common words when a guy tries to pronounce them all.
In the new study published in the journal Nature CommunicationsThey were able to decode it silently by imitating the 26 letters of the phonetic alphabet.
“If he was trying to say ‘cat,’ he would say Charlie Alpha Tango,” Metzger said. France Press agency.
Then the spell check interface used language modeling to crunch the data in real time, working on potential words or errors.
The study said the researchers were able to decode more than 1,150 words, which account for “more than 85% of the content in natural English sentences”.
That vocabulary can extend to more than 9,000 words, Metzger said, “which is basically the number of words most people use in a year.”
The device decoded about 29 characters per minute, with an error rate of 6%. That was about seven words a minute.
The man is referred to as BRAVO1, as the first participant in the arm and voice brain-computer interface restoration experiment.
Now in his late 30s, he suffered a stroke when he was 20 that left him with anarchia — the inability to speak clearly, though his cognitive function remained intact.
He usually communicates by using a pointer attached to a baseball cap to poke letters on the screen.
In 2019, researchers surgically implanted a high-density electrode on the surface of his brain, above his speech motor cortex.
Via a port embedded in his skull, they have since been able to monitor the different electrical patterns generated when he tries to pronounce different words or letters.
Unique feature
Metzger said that BRAVO1 “really enjoyed using this device because it’s able to communicate with us so quickly and easily.”
One of the best parts of the study, Metzger said, was when BRAVO1 was asked to say “whatever it wants.”
“I learned a lot about him,” Metzger said.
Among Bravo 1’s surprising comments, Metzger added, was that he “didn’t really like the food he lived in.”
Last year, a brain-computer interface developed at Stanford University was able to decode 18 words per minute when a participant imagined handwriting.
But Metzger said their speech-based approach has a “unique advantage.”
He said the 50 commonly used words – which the participant speaks entirely silently – can be used in many interactions, while the rarer ones can be spelled out, providing “the best of both worlds”.
The research, which still needs to be confirmed in other participants, is still some way from being made available to the thousands of people who lose the ability to speak due to strokes, accidents or illness each year.
Patrick DeGenaard, a professor of orthopedic neurology at the University of Newcastle in the United Kingdom who was not involved in the research, hailed the “absolutely impressive results”.
He said that because neuroprosthetic surgery is “very invasive and has risks,” it’s likely that only a very few people will use this device in the near future. France Press agency.
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