Postdoctoral scholar Nicholas Card getting the BCI system ready for ALS patient Casey Harrell
A new brain-computer interface (BCI) developed at UC Davis Health translates brain signals into speech with up to 97% accuracy — the most accurate system of its kind.
Researchers implanted sensors in the brain of a man, Casey Harrell, a 45-year-old man with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), who at the time of his enrolment in the BrainGate clinical trial , had weakness in his arms and legs and his speech was very hard to understand (dysarthria) and required others to help interpret for him. Harrell, was able to communicate his intended speech within minutes of activating the system.
A study about this work has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, a neurodegenerative disorder with variable motor and extra-motor manifestations with high mortality rates, affects the nerve cells that control movement throughout the body. The disease leads to a gradual loss of the ability to stand, walk and use one’s hands. It can also cause a person to lose control of the muscles used to speak, leading to a loss of understandable speech.
How the system works
Image – Nicholas Card on X – https://x.com/NS_Card/status/1823829731399344538
The new technology is being developed to restore communication for people who can’t speak due to paralysis or neurological conditions like ALS. It can interpret brain signals when the user tries to speak and turns them into text that is ‘spoken’ aloud by the computer. The voice was composed using artificial intelligence (AI) trained with existing audio samples of Harrell’s pre-ALS voice.
“Our BCI technology helped a man with paralysis to communicate with friends, families and caregivers,” said UC Davis neurosurgeon David Brandman. “Our paper demonstrates the most accurate speech neuroprosthesis (device) ever reported.” Brandman is the co-principal investigator and co-senior author of this study. He is an assistant professor in the UC Davis Department of Neurological Surgery and co-director of the UC Davis Neuroprosthetics Lab
This new development holds out much promise for people suffering from ALS and in particular those in Sub-Saharan Africa where the incidence of the disorder is between 5 and 15 per 100 000 compared to a world average of 4,42 per 100 000.
