Raphael Thys
When an injury or disease robs a person of the ability to move, the brain’s neural activity for walking, grabbing a cup of coffee or speaking a sentence remain.
In an exciting new piece of technology, a paralysed man ‘wrote’ out his thoughts with the help of a brain implant. A report published by Howard Hughes Medical Institute says that researchers have, for the first time, decoded the neural signals associated with writing letters, and then displayed typed versions of these letters in real time. The innovation could, with further development, let people with paralysis rapidly type without using their hands, says study coauthor Krishna Shenoy, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at Stanford University, who jointly supervised the work with Jaimie Henderson, a Stanford neurosurgeon. The scientists identified the sensory signals produced by the man’s brain when he tried to write letters, and translated them into text on screen by using an algorithm. This experiment has been published in Nature journal.
“When an injury or disease robs a person of the ability to move, the brain’s neural activity for walking, grabbing a cup of coffee or speaking a sentence remain. Researchers can tap into this activity to help people with paralysis or amputations regain lost abilities," says the report. The team worked with a participant enrolled in a clinical trial called BrainGate2. The participant, who was 65 years old at the time of the research, had a spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed from the neck down. Using signals the sensors picked up from individual neurons when the man imagined writing, a machine learning algorithm recognized the patterns his brain produced with each letter. With this system, the man could copy sentences and answer questions at a rate similar to that of someone his age typing on a smartphone. This study has the potential to help people with all kinds of disabilities.
Two tiny arrays of implanted electrodes relayed information from the brain area that controls the hands and arms to an algorithm, which translated it into letters that appeared on a screen. Credit: F. Willett et al./Nature 2021/Erika Woodrum
Brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) can restore communication to people who have lost the ability to move or speak. So far, a major focus of BCI research has been on restoring gross motor skills, such as reaching and grasping or point-and-click typing with a computer cursor. However, rapid sequences of highly dexterous behaviours, such as handwriting or touch typing, might enable faster rates of communication, the researchers wrote in Nature journal.
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