Artificial Intelligence Helps Woman Speak Again After Stroke
For the first time in many years of silence, 48-year-old Anne Johnson has regained her ability to speak with the help of AI, which converts her brain signals into words and facial expressions.
This was reported by the New York Post.
Johnson is a wife and mother of two children, who previously worked as a math teacher and volleyball and basketball coach in Saskatchewan, USA.
One day, she suffered a stroke that completely paralyzed her body and took away her ability to speak.
Doctors at the University of California, San Francisco, implanted 253 electrodes into the woman's brain and connected them to a computer through a small port attached to Johnson's head.
The electrodes are placed in the part of the brain responsible for speech. The sensors detect brain impulses and send them to the computer. As a result, an avatar chosen by Johnson herself appears on the monitor.
The avatar voices the woman's thoughts using a voice generated by AI based on a 15-minute speech recording that Johnson once gave at her own wedding.
In addition, the avatar is capable of reproducing certain facial expressions - variations of glances and different facial expressions, such as a smile, clenched lips, or raised eyebrows.
To teach the AI to recognize words, Joan had to mentally repeat various phrases from a 1024-word dictionary. The AI recorded brain activity and was able to establish a connection between brain impulses and individual expressions from the dictionary.
Subsequently, the AI learned to distinguish phonemes - individual speech units. Now it recognizes 39 phonemes, allowing it to "decode thoughts" from Joan at a speed of about 80 words per minute, which sounds quite natural.
"We are simply trying to restore people as they are," said Dr. Edward Chang, head of the Department of Neurological Surgery at the University of California, San Francisco.
Dr. Chang has been working on the "brain-computer" project for more than ten years. Currently, the scientist and his team are developing a wireless version of the device that will help people communicate freely without physically connecting to computers.
Recall that recently it became known that US scientists managed to reproduce Pink Floyd's track "Another Brick in the Wall" using impulses obtained from the upper temporal part of the brain.
For the experiment, 29 volunteers who listened to music and had a system of electrodes - sensors - implanted in their brains were involved.
In 2022, the "smart" prosthesis Esper Hand entered the list of the best inventions of humanity according to Time magazine. This is the development of the Ukrainian startup Esper Bionics, which uses the same principle.
"Over the next 30 years, the most important technology will be electronics inside the human body," says co-founder and CEO of Esper Bionics, Dmytro Gazda.
The exchange of information between the device and the human brain is done through a brain-computer interface. Thanks to DSP - digital signal processing - data is transmitted to the cloud and analyzed.
Over time, the prosthesis begins to "understand" frequently repeated algorithms of human movements and learns to predict them, helping the owner to use the prosthesis intuitively.