A speech prosthetic developed by a collaborative team of Duke neuroscientists, neurosurgeons, and engineers can translate a person’s brain signals into what they’re trying to say.
Appearing Nov. 6 in the journal Nature Communications, the new technology might one day help people unable to talk due to neurological disorders regain the ability to communicate through a brain-computer interface.
“There are many patients who suffer from debilitating motor disorders, like ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) or locked-in syndrome, that can impair their ability to speak,” said Gregory Cogan, PhD, a professor of neurology and neurosurgery at Duke and one of the lead researchers involved in the project. “But the current tools available to allow them to communicate are generally very slow and cumbersome.”
Imagine listening to an audiobook at half-speed. That’s the best speech decoding rate currently available, which clocks in at about 78 words per minute. People, however, speak around 150 words per minute.
The lag between spoken and decoded speech rates is partially due the relatively few brain activity sensors that can be fused onto a paper-thin piece of material that lays atop the surface of the brain. Fewer sensors provide less decipherable information to decode.
To improve on past limitations, Cogan teamed up with Jonathan Viventi, PhD, associate professor of biomedical engineering, whose lab specializes in making high-density, ultra-thin, and flexible brain sensors.
Viventi and his team packed a record-breaking 256 microscopic brain sensors onto a postage stamp-sized piece of flexible, medical-grade plastic. Neurons just a grain of sand apart can have wildly different activity patterns when coordinating speech, so it’s necessary to distinguish signals from neighboring brain cells to help make accurate predictions about intended speech.
After fabricating the new implant, Cogan and Viventi teamed up with several Duke University Hospital neurosurgeons, including Derek Southwell, MD, PhD, Nandan Lad, MD, PhD, and Allan Friedman, MD, who helped recruit four patients to test the implants. The experiment required the researchers to place the device temporarily in patients who were undergoing brain surgery for some other condition, such as treating Parkinson’s disease or having a tumor removed. Time was limited for Cogan and his team to test drive their device in the OR.
Read the full story from Duke Institute of Brain Sciences on Duke Today and in Newsweek.