Scientists have developed a neural brain implant that enabled a paralyzed man to communicate by turning his thoughts into words. This tech has provided him a new way to communicate after he lost his ability to speak.

 “This is farther than we’ve ever imagined we could go,” Oregon Health & Science University neurologist Melanie Fried-Oken told The New York Times. Now, all the patient has to do is try to speak out loud and the system will understand his action and decode his thoughts into words, displaying them on a screen, as per the research published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“To prove that you can decipher speech from the electrical signals in the speech motor area of your brain is groundbreaking,” Fried-Oken added.

Breakthrough invention

This is a breakthrough. The ability to communicate clearly without a single wrong word is a great invention in the area of the brain-computer interface.

 “That part of his brain might have been dormant, and we just didn’t know if it would ever really wake up in order for him to speak again,” lead study author Edward Chang told the NYT.

As of now, the system isn’t fully ready. The algorithm that decodes the patient’s thoughts guessed the correct word in roughly half of his 9,000 attempts. But as NYT notes, the number surged when the patient recited sentences that had already been typed on a screen.

Life-changing experience

Later, both individual words and sentences got more accurate with the aid of an autocorrect-like feature paired with the algorithm. The patient called the system a “life-changing experience” while speaking to NYT about the new tech.

 “I just want to, I don’t know, get something good, because I always was told by doctors that I had 0 chance to get better,” he said. “Not to be able to communicate with anyone, to have a normal conversation and express yourself in any way, it’s devastating, very hard to live with,” he added in a follow-up email.