Photo Courtesy of Duke University

Eleanor Day '25

EDITOR

On Nov. 6, 2023, a speech prosthetic was featured in the journal Nature Communications that uses a person’s brain signals and translates them into the speech of what they are trying to say. This tool, developed by neuroscientists, neurosurgeons, and engineers from Duke University shows promise to enable those who are incapable of speech due to neurological disorders to communicate.

The team at Duke dedicated to this project is currently working on moving past the limitations of speech decoding technology. Currently, the fastest available decoding tech works at a pace about half as fast as people tend to speak. Thus, the team is making it a priority to try to make their device more efficient.

To create such an efficient and impactful product, the team loaded a stamp-sized piece of plastic with 256 brain sensors. Then, to test the device, they recruited a couple of patients who were already undergoing brain surgery for unrelated reasons as test subjects. While the patients’ surgeries were ongoing, members of the team rushed in and temporarily placed the technology into the patients. Then the patients were asked to repeat a series of made-up words while the prosthetic was inside them, allowing the team to record activity from their motor cortexes that they could later use to detect how accurate their device was in translating brain signals into speech predictions. With the gathered data, the decoder yielded a 40 percent accuracy rate, indicating partial success, considering a lot of technology that attempts to translate brain signals to speech requires much more time to gather data from.

Now, with a 2.4 million dollar grant from the National Institutes of Health, the Duke team is attempting to create a wireless version of this prosthetic. Although the device requires much more improvement before it can become a part of daily life for the targeted users, this new technology shows promise in changing the lives of those who are incapable of speech because of neurological conditions.

Works Cited

"Brain Implant May Enable Communication from Thoughts Alone." Science Daily, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/11/231106134844.htm. Accessed 9 Nov. 2023.

Link: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/11/231106134844.htm