A Brain Implant Might Be The Future For Stroke Survivors and Their Speech Communication, According To Study

Is it possible to hear what people are thinking? According to a new UCLA Health Study initially shared in Nature Communications, scientists might have created a device that can do just that.

An experimental study was conducted on a 47 year old woman who experiened a stroke 18 years ago, leaving her unable to speak.

The CDC shares that having a stroke can leave a person with lasting effects. Some of which include "Paralysis, weakness, trouble with thinking, awareness, attention, learning, judgment, and memory, problems understanding or forming speech, trouble controlling or expressing emotions, numbness or strange sensation, pain in the hands and feet that worsens with movement and temperature changes, trouble with chewing and swallowing, problems with bladder and bowel control" and "depression."

After care includes a number of therapies, like speech, physcial, and occupational alongside medications that may help with post-stroke recovery. With last speech issues on a stroke patient, advances in devices to reintroduce this form of communication would be groundbreaking.

With the new invention from scientists, the team in California through an implant to the speech hub of the brain, was able to record "the woman's brain activity using electrodes while she spoke sentences silently in her brain. The scientists used a synthesizer they built using her voice before her injury to create a speech sound that she would have spoken. They trained an AI model that translates neural activity into units of sound," said WCVB.com.

This implant reads her thoughts in real time, and acts similarly to devices that process voicemails or calls. The “streaming approach...would be a significant advance in the naturalness of speech." says author on the study Gopala Anumanchipalli.

In order for this to become a mainstream use for the future of speech analysis, more research would need to be conducted Anumanchipalli concludes.

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