[imagesource: Barbara Ries]

Each year, thousands of people lose the ability to speak due to a stroke, accident, or disease.

But research conducted at the University of California San Francisco is leading the way to enable these people to fully communicate with “speech neuroprosthesis”, which is basically like mind-reading.

The device that they’ve developed allows a man with severe paralysis to communicate by translating his brain signals into words on a monitor.

Here’s senior author of the study, neurosurgeon Professor Edward Chang (he’s seen above performing brain surgery), via Mashable:

“To our knowledge, this is the first successful demonstration of direct decoding of full words from the brain activity of someone who is paralysed and cannot speak,” adding that, “It shows strong promise to restore communication by tapping into the brain’s natural speech machinery.”

Previous approaches in this research would include patients spelling things out and typing out letters one-by-one in text, a limiting and slow method of communication for a brain that processes up to 150 or 200 words per minute.

But Chang’s study is vastly different. Being more rapid and organic, his team is translating signals intended to control muscles of the vocal system for speaking words, rather than signals to move the arm or hand to enable typing.

A man in his late 30s who suffered a devastating brainstem stroke more than 15 years ago was at the centre of the research and helped come up with 50 words to use in the new technology, which can generate over 1 000 sentences.

The technology requires a high-density electrode array to be surgically implanted over a person’s speech motor cortex.

This video has it all:

Just wow.

[source:mashable]