<i>For a long time, this all sounded purely like sci-fi. But now, it’s reality. A computer reading thoughts. While it’s limited for the moment it will soon become much better.</i>
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We don’t know his name. A study published by a team from the University of California in San Francisco published by The New England Journal of Medicine calls him BRAVO1. He is the first volunteer of the study and the acronym stands for Brain-Computer Interface Restoration of Arm and Voice.
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In layman’s terms, it is a device that should allow the brain to communicate with a computer allow the user to restore his voice and move his arms. What we know is that BRAVO1 is a man close to his forties who suffer heavy brain damage after suffering a stroke fifteen years ago. The stroke led to him losing control over his vocals and limbs. Currently, he uses a pointer attached to a baseball cap to communicate. By moving his head he slowly writes letters on a computer screen and writes messages in this very slow way.
A team led by Edward Chang and Karanush Gangul – two neurosurgeons – implanted an electrode system capable of high-resolution detection of neuron activity in the center that controls the vocals. Then the man repeated fifty of the most common words such as water, family, or good. In his head. In a reaction to the thoughts, the brain tried to send signals to the vocals and different neurons activated. Information about activated neurons was sent to a computer where A.I. evaluated them and was capable of removing substantial amounts of the informational noise.
Later, the computer learned to distinguish the different words the man tried to way based on the neuron patterns. Once the computer decoded the word it was shown on a monitor.
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While scientists were previously capable of “reading” words from the activity of the brain it was only from people who were capable of standard speech. The computer was even capable of doing so in real-time. But can it work with people who lost the ability to communicate vocally? Well, BRAVO1 hadn’t used his vocals for a long fifteen years. The question was – Hasn’t the part of his brain responsible for speech forgotten how to speak? The study proves the answer is no. It hadn’t.
A healthy human communicates at a speed of roughly 150 – 200 words per minute. Compared to this communicating by spelling out words is slow and tiresome. Thus the Chang and Gangul choose to use a system capable of distinguishing whole words.
The volunteer BRAVO1 was asked a simple question. “Do you want some water?” And he answered, “No, I’m not thirsty”. Further communication was conducted at a speed of eighteen words per minute with 93 % reliability. Such high reliability was majorly supported by “auto-correct” similar to the one in your own smartphone.
Eighteen words per minute might seem incredibly slow to you. But it is a major success. Evidence that the road they are on has a future and they will work hard on improving their system, its capacity, reliability, and speed.
<h4>Sources:</h4>
* https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2027540?query=featured_home
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