Neuroscientists inched closer last week to developing a commercial device that can instantly translate brain activity into speech for people with severe paralysis.
A team of researchers from University of California, Berkeley and University of California, San Francisco were able to solve a key problem for many brain-computer interfaces: lag. Their Nature Neuroscience study describes how the device shrunk the time between a person’s thoughts and how soon it broadcast the study participant’s words.
“When the delay is minimal, she feels embodied,” said Gopala Anumanchipalli, one of the paper’s co-authors and a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley, speaking about the study participant, a 47-year-old woman with quadraplegia at the start of the trial. “She’s able to feel like she is the one making the sound, and she is able to control it. That is very important for her to be able to use this like an extension of herself.”
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