At just 45 years old, Casey Harrell lived prostrate in a wheelchair, with almost no ability to move and with enormous difficulty speaking. The progression of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (known as ALS, the disease that also affected physicist Stephen Hawking and that Barcelona source Juan Carlos Unzue suffers from) has not only left him without strength in his arms and legs, but in addition, it has deprived him of the possibility of communicating with friends and family.
But last year, something changed. Harel volunteered for a clinical trial to test a new brain-computer interface. Now, according to the project’s leaders, he has regained the ability to communicate. “The first time he succeeded, we all cried out of emotion,” says Sergei Stavisky, one of the project’s leaders. The clinical trial, called BrainGate, was launched last summer. At the time, Harel underwent brain surgery in which 256 electrodes were implanted in the specific area of his brain where the ability to speak and express oneself arises. Soon after, tests began to connect his brain to a computer.
According to the study’s leaders, the goal was for the machine to be able to read Harrell’s brain activity, translate it instantly, and pronounce all the words he was thinking. For this, a voice model was created that sounded exactly like the patient’s voice before he was paralyzed by the disease.
In the first test of the device, it took half an hour for this patient to deliver about 50 words with 99.6 percent accuracy. “It was a very emotional moment,” says Staviski. “When we first saw the words appear on the screen, we all cried.” Just when it seemed like the success couldn’t go any further, the second test with the device produced even more extraordinary results.
Successful test
The machine was able to decode more than 125,000 words with more than 97 percent accuracy. “This is the most successful test yet of this type of technology,” says David Bradman, a neurosurgeon at the University of California and author of the work.
Related News
In recent years, several projects have emerged that attempt to connect the brains of paralyzed patients to computers so that they can regain, for example, some of their movement or their ability to speak.
Grégoire Cotin’s lab in Switzerland has already made some pretty big advances in this area, even allowing patients who were completely paralyzed to walk again. Elon Musk’s company Neuralink is also working on the same line, and claims to be conducting its first studies on patients. But despite all this work, there has been almost no progress to date that would allow us to restore something as human as the ability to speak.
“Infuriatingly humble social media buff. Twitter advocate. Writer. Internet nerd.”
