Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is a terrible disease because of its nature. degenerativeand because it affects neuromuscular system. Fortunately, science and medicine have been working hard to deal with this for some time now, and the latest brain implant that has been attached to a patient has become a great ray of hope for all those suffering from this disease.

As many of our readers will know, ALS was the disease that Stephen Hawking suffered from. This completely paralyzed and severely disfigured him, confined him to a wheelchair and permanently disabled him from work. Scientific and technological progress made Hawking possible to move and interact with the world in a way that would have been unthinkable decades ago.

Brain implants and brain-computer interfaces are one of people’s most important allies against amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and they are constantly improving. The latest system developed by the UC Davis Health hospital in the United States has achieved very positive results in Casey HarrelA 45-year-old ALS patient who was unable to even speak due to the worsening of the disease.

Casey is able to speak thanks to this brain implant

And the best part is that this new system that has been implanted can transform brain signals into speech 97% accuracywhich means that the error rate is minimal and you can communicate properly with anyone without having to worry about glitches or errors appearing during the conversion process.

Its operation is quite simple to explain. The brain-computer interface is implanted in the areas of the brain that control speech, known as Broca’s area and Wernicke’s areatherefore, we can see in the video that two implants are placed in different parts of the outer part of the patient’s skull.

They have a total of these implants 256 electrodes that analyze brain activity which is produced in these areas and converts the signals into information interpretable by the computer that is ultimately responsible for generating language.

Interestingly, but best of all, the voice used by this system is what the patient originally hadbecause an artificial intelligence that was previously trained with patient voice samples was used to generate the output voice. Being able to speak again must be amazing, but doing it with the voice you had makes it even more impressive.