Pat Bennett's prescription is a bit more complicated than 'Take a couple of aspirins and call me in the morning.' But a quartet of baby-aspirin-sized sensors implanted in her brain are aimed at addressing a condition that's frustrated her and others: the loss of the ability to speak intelligibly. The devices transmit signals from a couple of speech-related regions in Bennett's brain to state-of-the-art software that decodes her brain activity and converts it to text displayed on a computer screen.
A research participant in the Dr. Edward Chang’s study of speech neuroprostheses, is connected to computers that translate her brain signals as she attempts to speak into the speech and facial movements of an avatar on Monday, May 22, 2023, in El Cerrito, Calif. At left is UCSF clinical research coordinator Max Dougherty. Credit: Noah Berger
Usually, ALS first manifests at the body's periphery—arms and legs, hands and fingers. For Bennett, the deterioration began not in her spinal cord, as is typical, but in her. She can still move around, dress herself and use her fingers to type, albeit with increasing difficulty. But she can no longer use the muscles of her lips, tongue, larynx and jaws to enunciate clearly the phonemes—or units of sound, such as"sh"—that are the building blocks of speech.
On March 29, 2022, a Stanford Medicine neurosurgeon placed two tiny sensors apiece in two separate regions—both implicated in speech production—along the surface of Bennett's brain. The sensors are components of an intracortical brain-computer interface, or iBCI. Combined with state-of-the-art decoding software, they're designed to translate the brain activity accompanying attempts at speech into words on a screen.
Henderson, the John and Jean Blume-Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in the department of neurosurgery, is the co-senior author of a paper describing the results, published Aug. 23 inHis co-senior author, Krishna Shenoy, Ph.D., professor of electrical engineering and of bioengineering, died before the study was published.
An artificial-intelligence algorithm receives and decodes electronic information emanating from Bennett's brain, eventually teaching itself to distinguish the distinct brain activity associated with her attempts to formulate each of the 39 phonemes that compose spoken English.
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