In December 2009, US scientists successfully tested a system that translates brain waves into speech. This raises the possibility of direct communication soon for persons who have been robbed of their voices due to injury or disease.
The system was tested on a 26 year old male, who lost the ability to speak due to a brain stem stroke. His consciousness and cognitive abilities were intact, which is called a "locked-in syndrome." In this condition, communication by eye movement or other limited motion is possible, but extremely cumbersome.
Scientists implanted an electrode about 5 millimetres deep into the part of the subject's brain responsible for planning speech. Pretty invasive surgery but after a few months nerve cells grew into the electrode, producing detectable signals. “It took a few years to develop a computer capable of discriminate elements of speech from the busy backdrop of neural activity” a lead researcher from the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems at Boston University said. "All the neurons are firing all the time, but there's a subtle change in the firing rates. The trick was trying to decode that". The first “words” deciphered were actually 3 vowel sounds so the researchers stressed that “we are still a few years from useful technology”. The future fast approaches and total communication is just over the horizon of time.
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