paralysis

High-performance speech neuroprosthesis

Prof. Francis R. Willett from the Department of Neurobiology, Stanford University School of Medicine, reported their newly developed BCI device/method for speech neuroprosthesis. They focused on addressing the communication challenges faced by individuals with paralysis, particularly those who can no longer speak due to conditions such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). People with neurological disorders often experience severe speech and motor impairments, including the complete loss of speech (locked-in syndrome). While there have been advancements in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that enable individuals to communicate through hand movement activities, speech BCIs have not yet achieved high accuracies for unconstrained communication with large vocabularies.