<\/p>\n
\u201cLiving with a disease like ALS, you are supposed to have diminished dreams. I do not,\u201d Harrell tells MIT Technology Review<\/em>. \u201cAny one of these things would be an absolute godsend of improvement. To have all of them, and many, many more, is truly revolutionary.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Within the first 22.6 months after the device was implanted, Harrell had used it for more than 3,800 hours at home without any researchers present, the team reported today in the journal Nature Medicine<\/em>. \u201cHe\u2019s the first power user of a speech BCI,\u201d says team member Sergey Stavisky, a neuroengineer at the University of California, Davis.<\/p>\n Three years ago, Harrell entrusted David Brandman, an associate professor of neurological surgery at the University of California, Davis, and his colleagues with his brain. Harrell, who was 45 at the time, had already been diagnosed with ALS, a degenerative disease that robs people of the use of their muscles.<\/p>\n Harrell was dependent on others to control his wheelchair and to dress and feed him. He had difficulty speaking; people struggled to understand what he was saying. Then Brandman and his colleagues asked if he\u2019d like to trial a brain implant that might help him communicate. \u201cThe industry was [on the] cusp of a transformation, and I wanted to be part of it,\u201d says Harrell. He signed up.<\/p>\n In July 2023, during a five-hour operation, doctors implanted four arrays of 64 electrodes each into his brain. Each pair of arrays was wired to a \u201cpedestal\u201d connection point\u2014creating two docking locations on the exterior of his skull to connect the electrodes to a computer.<\/p>\n The team had long been working on developing algorithms to decode brain activity into speech. Their system works by recording activity from the speech motor cortex\u2014a region of the brain responsible for the movements that allow us to speak.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are 39 phonemes that make up all the sounds in the [American] English language,\u201d says Nicholas Card, a neuroengineer at UC Davis and member of the team. Mapping neural activity related to producing each of those phonemes can allow the team to create a personalized speech decoder and software that can \u201cspeak\u201d those words. \u201cWe first go from brain data to phonemes, and then from phonemes to words,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n They started using the device around a month after the surgery. The team got Harrell\u2019s speech decoder working on the first day, says Card. On that day in August, Harrell used the device to speak with a 50-word vocabulary, and 99.6% of the words were as he\u2019d intended. That vocabulary was later expanded to 125,000 words with 97.5% accuracy.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n #man #ALS #power #user #brain #implant #lets #speak<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cLiving with a disease like ALS, you are supposed to have diminished dreams. I do…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13857,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[10333,1403,9495,2581,230,168,3490,3572],"class_list":["post-13856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-stories","tag-als","tag-brain","tag-implant","tag-lets","tag-man","tag-power","tag-speak","tag-user"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/h_16269933.jpg",1200,600,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/h_16269933-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/h_16269933-300x150.jpg",300,150,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/h_16269933-768x384.jpg",640,320,true],"large":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/h_16269933-1024x512.jpg",640,320,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/h_16269933.jpg",1200,600,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/h_16269933.jpg",1200,600,false],"covernews-featured":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/h_16269933-1024x512.jpg",1024,512,true],"covernews-medium":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/h_16269933-540x340.jpg",540,340,true]},"author_info":{"display_name":"admin","author_link":"https:\/\/news678.top\/?author=1"},"category_info":"Stories<\/a>","tag_info":"Stories","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13856"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13856\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Decoding speech<\/h3>\n