Many MindedSpeech implants move from a few trial volunteers toward wireless devices
Science News devoted the season two finale of its podcast The Deep End, reported by Laura Sanders, to brain implants that restore speech. One participant is Casey Harrell, who has ALS and can no longer talk. He volunteered for a BrainGate 2 clinical trial, and his implant detects the neural patterns that appear when he tries to say a word. The system uses ports on his head connected to external wires, so it is not portable.
The field is still very small. Leigh Hochberg, who directs the BrainGate clinical trials consortium, estimates that fewer than 10 people, possibly five or six, have electrodes in the brain that decode attempted speech. He says academic research reduced the field's risk about 10 years ago, and he puts the number of companies now pursuing implantable brain-computer interfaces at likely a dozen or more.
One of them, Paradromics, has built a fully implantable, wireless device about the size of a dime that sits on the motor cortex. Surgeon Matthew Willsey of University of Michigan Health says it carries 421 electrodes, each about 1.5 millimeters long, pushed into the brain during deployment. This summer he implanted it in a 68-year-old Michigan woman with primary lateral sclerosis, which has taken most of her ability to speak. The device is running and she is testing it. She has used it to talk to her grandchildren by phone.
For abundance, the shift from wired ports to a wireless implant matters. Speech is how people reach care, family and daily life, and a device that does not tether someone to external equipment is easier to live with. Caveats are large: the Paradromics system is at a very early research stage with much left to test, the video of its voice output came from Paradromics, and only a handful of people have speech-decoding implants. Watch for more participants and longer results.
Source: Science News