Brain Chip Implant Enables Paralyzed ALS Patient To Speak And Work Again
Recent breakthroughs in neural engineering have bridged the gap between brain-computer interfaces and practical tools for daily life. A long-term study published in Nature reveals that a 47-year-old man paralyzed by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) has successfully used an implanted neural device to communicate independently at home and maintain a full-time job.
The participant, Casey Harrell, was diagnosed with ALS and developed severe dysarthria, a condition that rendered his speech nearly impossible to understand. In 2023, neurosurgeons at the University of California, Davis, as part of the multi-institutional BrainGate2 clinical trial, implanted four microelectrode arrays into Harrell's left precentral gyrus, the part of the brain that's responsible for controlling speech muscles. These four arrays contain a total of 256 electrodes designed to record the electrical firing of individual neurons when Harrell attempts to speak or move.
While previous neural prosthetics could decode words with high accuracy, they typically relied...
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