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Wireless Device Reads Brain Signals, Turns them into Speech (Video)

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by Aaron Saenz on January 4th, 2010
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.

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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Braingate Frees Trapped Minds

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by Aaron Saenz on May 20th, 2009

It is a horrifying concept: being buried alive. Even more terrible is the prospect of living trapped in our own bodies, unable to move or communicate. It’s called locked-in syndrome. Characters like Captain Pike and Jean-Dominique Bauby, (one fictional, the other not) describe the fear and frustration of living with a healthy mind in a broken body. But there is a real-life hope. As its name suggests, Cyberkinetics’ Braingate Neural Interface device allows patients to open the door between their mind and the outside world. Utilizing years of research studying brain signals, Braingate can read impulses in the brain using tiny implanted wires and translate those impulses into commands for computer cursors, wheelchairs, and perhaps even robotic limbs.

braingate-demonstration-diagram1

Braingate reads signals in the motor cortex and translates those signals into movements of a cursor on a screen.

The procedure for implanting Braingate may seem pure science fiction, but it works. Hair-thin gold wires are connected to individual neurons in the brain’s motor cortex. These wires are gathered at a small silicon array and connected to a “pedestal” embedded in the skull. This metallic interface is easy to spot (it’s a big metal nub on the top of the head). From the pedestal, signals can be sent to a computer for translation. By interpreting the motor cortex signals, scientists can determine what your brain would be trying to move (arm, hand, finger, etc) if you weren’t paralyzed.

So you have a metal nub in your head, and some wires poking into your brain, what’s the pay off?  How about the most intuitive mouse ever: by thinking about raising or lowering their hands, patients can move a cursor on the screen of a PC. Squeeze their imaginary hand, and the cursor clicks. The brain signals aren’t completely mapped out yet, and keeping track of one’s thoughts isn’t an easy task, so the cursor tends to jiggle a little and can be hard to move quickly. That being said, it allows individuals who have a hard time even blinking to be able to communicate with others and manipulate devices from their computer. Check out Kathy Hutchinson, one of the first patients, in this story from 60 minutes, the cable connected to her skull seems to be straight out of the Matrix:

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