Implanted electrodes in the speech center of the brain can communicate wirelessy via FM transmission with a computer. This allows a computer to inteprete brain activity into sounds using a speech synthesizer.
Remarkable news keeps coming for those who are trapped in their own bodies. People with locked-in syndrome, a condition where a healthy mind is unable to express itself due to brain damage, are slowly being opened up through direct contact with their motor neurons in the brain. Frank Guenther at Boston University’s Speech Lab has teamed up with Phillip Kennedy at Neural Signals to measure activity in the speech centers of the brain through implanted electrodes. These electrodes can then relay the information to a sub-dermal amplifier and then to a computer via wireless FM transmission. The results: a patient has demonstrated the ability to form rudimentary vowel sounds on a synthesizer using just his thoughts. It’s a small step, but research like this may one day allow someone to simply think of the words he wants to say, and have a computer do the talking for him. We have some videos of the wireless brain signal to speech test results after the break.
Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs), aka brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), are in development by several different teams across the globe. The Braingate project uses similar wireless transmission technology to connect electrodes in the brain to cursors on a computer, or even the controls of an electric wheelchair. Like many such projects, Braingate uses motor neurons to control movement. We’ve seen other teams work with robotic arms and prosthetic limbs. The Speech Lab/Neural Signals BMI is somewhat rarer because it is translating those signals which might inform mouth/tongue/vocal chord movement and directly interpreting them as sounds. This layer of interpretation is difficult to perfect but its pursuit gives us hope that one day we could see devices that actually “read” our thoughts and translate them into images, sounds, and other sensations. Once we achieved that level of “mind-reading”, there could be a direct conduit between our mental and digital worlds. Totally immersive virtual reality, surrogate bodies…the possibilities really expand at that point.
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