Researchers in the United States have invented a sensor that can be implanted in the brain and allows you to think of letters and see them appear written on a computer screen.
Portugal Digital with Lusa
This unprecedented technology could give paralyzed people the ability to communicate in writing without having to use their hands, said Stanford University researcher Krishna Shenoy, one of the co-authors of the study published on Wednesday in the scientific journal Nature.
–
For this study, the researchers were able to decipher the activity that happens in the brain when trying to write letters by hand and implanted a sensor in the brain of a person paralyzed with an injury to the cervical spine.
Then they used an algorithm to identify letters when the volunteer tried to write them, translating brain activity in real time to letters that appeared on a screen.
Because these are handwritten letters, a rate of 90 characters per minute was achieved, more than twice as much as had been achieved with a brain-computer ‘interface’ in previous experiments.
“The sensor decodes the thought associated with writing and produces action”, summarized researcher Jose Carmena, a neuro-engineer at the University of California at Berkely, who considered the study “a major advance in this field”.
Principal investigator Frank Willett said that “this system uses both the fertile neuronal activity recorded by intercortical electrodes and the power of language models that, when applied to decoded letters, can create text quickly and faithfully”.
The study volunteer is a 65-year-old man who was paralyzed from the neck down and two small aspirin-sized electrodes were placed on a part of the associated brain responsible for the movement of his right arm and hand.
Using signals that sensors detected on individual neurons when a man imagined writing, an algorithm recognized the patterns that his brain produced when he thought of each letter.
With this system, the man was able to copy phrases and answer questions at the same rate that anyone can do it when typing on a cell phone.
The speed of the system is due to the specific activity that each letter triggers in the brain, which allows the algorithm to distinguish them.
The study was carried out as part of the collaborative project Braingate, which brings together researchers from Brown, Harvard, Stanford, Case Western Reserve universities and the Massachusetts hospital and medical center in Providence VA, in the state of Rhode Island.
–
