INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Many thousands of people a year could benefit from so-called voice prosthesis
Their cognitive functions remain more or less intact, but they have suffered speech loss due to stroke, the neurodegenerative disorder ALS,
and other brain conditions
If successful, researchers hope the technique could be extended to help people who have difficulty vocalizing because of conditions such as
cerebral palsy or autism.The potential of voice neuroprosthesis is beginning to trigger interest among businesses
Precision Neuroscience claims to be capturing higher resolution brain signals than academic researchers, since the electrodes of its
implants are more densely packed.The company has worked with 31 patients and plans soon to collect data from more, providing a potential
pathway to commercialization.Precision received regulatory clearance on April 17 to leave its sensors implanted for up to 30 days at a time
best-known brain-computer interface (BCI) company, has focused on enabling people with paralysis to control computers rather than giving
them a synthetic voice.An important obstacle to the development of brain-to-voice technology is the time patients take to learn how to use
If they remained very similar, machine-learning models trained on previous individuals could be used for new patients, said Nick Ramsey, a
BCI researcher at University Medical Centre Utrecht.
