In a study, medical researchers attached the human brain waves of a paralyzed person who was not able to talk, and they have attained a sentence on the computer screen.
On Wednesday, the report was reported, but it will take years of extra research and marks a significant milestone towards restoring more natural communication for disabled people who cannot talk with others because of illness or injury.
A neurosurgeon at the University of California, Dr. Edward Chang, who headed the study, described that most of them take for granted how easily they communicate through their speech. He added that it is exciting to think they are at the very start of a new chapter, a new field to comfort the disturbance of disabled people who lost their ability to talk with their loved ones.
These days, patients who can not write or speak because of their illness, such as paralysis, have a few methods to communicate. Here we will see the example: a person in this experiment, who wasn’t identified to secure his privacy, practices a pointer connected to a baseball cap that allows him to shake his head to hit letters or words on the computer screen. Moreover, there are several other equipment that detect a person’s eye movement. The method is a gullably slow and bounded substitution for speech.
Source: Web
One of the emerging fields
Detecting a human brain signals to operate across a disability is one of the emerging and hot fields. In the previous years, experiments and numerous other tests with brain-controlled prosthetics have permitted paralyzed patients to move hands and even used to take drinks via their robotic arms. Patients just thought about moving their hands, and those mind signals are transmitted via a computer to the artificial part.
Dr. Chang’s crew made that work to create a ‘speech neuroprosthetic,’ decoding mind signals that usually manage the vocal area, a little muscle movement of patient’s lips, tongue jaw, and larynx that from every vowel and consonant.
A person voluntarily allowed Dr. Chang’s team to test a newly developed device who, fifteen years ago, faced a brain-stem attack that caused extensive paralysis. The incident robbed his ability to talk to anyone. Furthermore, the researchers used electrodes on the surface of the patient’s brain, on the tract that controls speech.
