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The laptop produces the word your brain wants to say

Dutch and German scientists have enabled an epilepsy patient to hear through a laptop the word she was thinking of at that exact moment. This is an important step in research aiming to facilitate communication by people with severe speech impairments. Using machine learning, researchers from Maastricht University, the University of Bremen and the Kempenhaeghe expertise centre had a patient with depth electrodes in her brain hear in real time the word she wanted to utter. The findings were recently published in Communications Biology.

Brains

First the patient read a number of texts aloud. Using machine learning, the computer connected the words spoken with the patient’s brain activity. The system was then able to generate audio directly from the brain signals, even when the patient only imagined speaking. “Our system shows that imagined speech and normal speech share some underlying brain processes,” says study leader Christian Herff. “Our data models based on brain activity from normal speech also work for imagined speech.” For this study, Herff worked closely with neurosurgeon Pieter Kubben from the Maastricht University Medical Center (MUMC+), who placed the depth electrodes in the patient’s brain. This is a common procedure when the neurologists at Kempenhaeghe need to identify the part of the brain in which the epileptic seizures occur.

Speech disorders

This remarkable finding is an important step in research on the development of a neuroprosthesis for speech. It would allow people with serious speech disorders caused by acquired brain damage (the result of a cerebral infarction, for example) to communicate again in a relatively natural way. “Following this initial feasibility study with 100 separate words, we’re now expanding our experiments so patients can practise using imagined speech and producing comprehensible sentences,” Herff says.

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