How a Brain Implant and AI Gave a Woman with Paralysis Her Voice Back

Today is an opportunity for Ann and Bill to have a conversation through the decoding of our

brain

to facilitate what we believe would be a future use of a real-life application of the technology. Basically, we want to try to create a demo where we are decoding the text, speech, and avatar at the same time from Ann's

brain

while she tries to speak silently. We trained some new models yesterday, so we may need to test them out a bit. It should work. The device is an electrocorticography grid that is attached to a pedestal that is screwed to the participant's skull.

Ann is the first person to have this combination. I think you are wonderful. In Chang's lab we really focus on restoring

voice

to people who have lost it due to conditions like a stroke or ALS. What we're detecting is neural activity directly related to attempts to move your facial muscles, and that's what we can decode as speech. Hi Ana how are you? Good to see you. Giving them the ability to communicate again with their loved ones and caregivers is really what we're looking to do. I was thinking about running to the store. What time will you be home?

In about an hour. Do not make me laugh. It is the first time we have had a conversation using this system. To communicate in your daily life you have a communication assistance device. These are dollar store cups. And she interacts with it using a small reflective sticker. It's very slow and the device is now very old, but she trusts it. For us, having that conversation using her Dynavox would probably be like a 5-7 minute conversation. It was nice to have a conversation. I forgot how slow this machine is. When Ann was 30 years old, she was playing volleyball with some friends and suffered a stroke that caused the condition she has now, which is locked-in syndrome.

At the time, she had a 6-month-old and a 7-year-old. You are truly wonderful people. Doctors have no idea why this happened. That was 18 years ago. How can we create technology that can help people contribute really meaningfully with all kinds of skills? Hello. How are things going? Hello Ana. Things are going well. How do you feel about the Blue Jays today? Everything is possible. Well, you don't show much confidence in them today, do you? You are right about that. I guess we'll see, right? I feel very fortunate to work with a group of students, fellows, engineers and scientists, all as a team who have had the singular goal for the last 10 years of building a device that can restore speech.

And we were very close to making this something that will be a real solution for patients. Will you do me a favor? It's amazing to hear her talk about her journey. Pass me that please. Aside from his motivations for advancing this technology, I thought it would be good for me. If you are able to produce text, synthesized speech and then also a personalized avatar, she believes that would really improve her (and us too) ability to become a counselor and work with people. It is important to develop technologies that can better support people with disabilities because there are a large number of people we exclude from workplaces.

My hope is that this is just a stepping stone to many other things that can be done to help people who have lost the ability to communicate reach their full potential.