Implant lets paralysed man spell out 1,100 words

PARIS: A paralysed man who cannot speak or type was able to spell out over 1,000 words using a neuroprosthetic device that translates his brain waves into full sentences, US researchers said on Tuesday.

“Anything is possible,” was one of the man’s favourite phrases to spell out, said the first author of a new study on the research, Sean Metzger of the University of California San Francisco (UCSF).

Last year the team of UCSF researchers showed that a brain implant called a brain-computer interface could translate 50 very common words when the man attempted to say them in full. In the new study, published in the journal Nature Communications, they were able to decode him silently miming the 26 letters of the phonetic alphabet. “So if he was trying to say ‘cat’, he would say charlie-alpha-tango,” Metzger said.

A spelling interface then used language-modelling to crunch the data in real time, working out possible words or errors. The researchers were able to decode more than 1,150 words, which represent “over 85 percent of the content in natural English sentences”, the study said.