2023-08-27 18:30:03
Equipped with neuroprostheses and facing her avatar, Ann, suffering from paralysis of the vocal cord muscles, takes part in the study on language by Edward Chang’s team (University of California), in El Cerrito (United States). United), in May 2023. NOAH BERGER
Neurosurgeon Jaimie Henderson (Stanford University) feels he has “closed the loop”. When he was 5 years old, a serious car accident almost deprived his father of speech, making incomprehensible the funny stories he tried to tell him. The child he was was wondering how to re-establish communication with his father. The researcher is today publishing results showing that paralyzed patients can partially recover their speech abilities. This is thanks to a brain implant capturing neural signals that an artificial intelligence (AI) translates almost instantaneously into sentences displayed on a computer screen, at an unprecedented rate and with unprecedented precision.
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The work of his team has been published August 23 in the review Naturein parallel with those of another group led by Edward Chang (University of California, San Francisco), who refined a comparable process by having the reconstructed sentences pronounced by an expressive virtual avatar. The two studies testify to recent progress in the development of neuroprostheses capable of extracting from the brain the speech that remains locked there due to paralysis resulting from vascular accidents or neurodegenerative diseases.
Pat Bennett, a former director of human resources, now 68, learned in 2012 that she had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Charcot’s disease), affecting the neurons controlling movements. In his case, the muscles of the lips, tongue, larynx and jaws were affected first, gradually reducing his speech abilities. In 2021, she became aware of the work of Jaimie Henderson and his team which enabled a paralyzed person to produce, thanks to a brain-computer interface, 18 words per minute on a screen, by imagining writing the letters by hand. . She immediately volunteered for a clinical trial.
“We are getting closer to something usable”
The patient enrolled in the trial led by Edward Chang, whose first name only – Ann – has been revealed, presents a different profile: the paralysis which affects the muscles of her vocal system results from a stroke which occurred eighteen years ago. years old – she is now 47 years old. There too, another patient had preceded her, arriving, according to a study published in 2021 in the New England Journal of Medicineto produce 18 words per minute with an accuracy of 75%, on a vocabulary of 50 words.
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