Brain Implant Lets Woman Talk After 18 Years of Silence Due to Stroke

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For nearly two decades, a stroke had left a woman unable to speak — until now. 

Thanks to a new brain implant, her thoughts are being turned into real-time speech, giving her a voice again for the first time in 18 years.

The device was tested on a 47-year-old woman with quadriplegia who lost her ability to speak after a stroke. Doctors placed the brain-computer implant during surgery as part of a clinical trial, The Associated Press reported.

It “converts her intent to speak into fluent sentences,” said Gopala Anumanchipalli, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley and a co-author of the study published Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Unlike other brain-computer systems that have a delay, this new technology works in real time. Scientists say that the delay in existing systems makes conversations hard and, sometimes, frustrating.

Jonathan Brumberg of the Speech and Applied Neuroscience Lab at the University of Kansas, who reviewed the findings, welcomed the advances.

This is “a pretty big advance in our field,” he told The Associated Press.

Here’s how it works: The team recorded the woman’s brain activity using electrodes as she silently imagined saying sentences.

They also used a synthesizer using her voice before her stroke to re-create the sound she would have made. An AI model was trained to translate her brain signals into sounds. 

The system sends each small sound unit — roughly a half-syllable — into a recorder every 80 milliseconds. That means it works quickly, just like real-time transcription on a phone call.

“It’s not waiting for a sentence to finish,” Anumanchipalli said. “It’s processing it on the fly.”

Decoding speech that fast could help the device keep up with the speed of natural conversation, Brumberg added. Using a person’s actual voice “would be a significant advance in the naturalness of speech.”

Though the research was partly funded by the National Institutes of Health, Anumanchipalli said it was not affected by recent cuts to NIH funding. 

He added that more research is still needed, but with “sustained investments,” the device could be available to patients within 10 years.

More information

The Stroke Foundation has more on communication after a stroke.

SOURCE: The Associated Press, March 31, 2025

Source: HealthDay

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