Is it really possible for a device to give people the capability of typing written texts just by thinking it? Evidently, Facebook has been financing an extensive university research that might help bring the technology from science fiction to reality.

It will not only bring communication to a whole new level, but it might one day help restore the speech of people who have lost the capability.

Research Funded By Facebook

It was only in 2017 that Facebook announced that it wanted to develop a type of headband that would let its users type 100 words per minute just by thinking. Researchers at the University of California San Francisco recently showed how the brain activity of participants as they are speaking can create synthetic versions of the speech. However, the process of decoding the signals are rather slow as it took researchers weeks and even months to decipher them.

Now, a complementary research published in Nature Communications describes the concrete steps that are being taken to turn this into a reality. And in the new study, researchers were able to instantly identify the participants’ answers based solely on their brain activity.

Brain Signals To Speech

For the study, epilepsy patients with normal speech had electrocorticography arrays surgically implanted onto the surface of one hemisphere of their brains. This allowed researchers to gather more detailed data than if they had relied on non-invasive EEG or fMRI data. Researchers then recorded the participants’ brain data while they were listening to a set of nine questions and answering out loud from 24 answer choices.

Soon, the algorithms that the researchers developed were able to detect when the participants were hearing a new question or responding, as well as identify which of the 24 choices the participant was saying with up to 61 percent accuracy. Similarly, the algorithm was also able to identify which of the predefined questions the participants heard with 75 percent accuracy, helping it to also narrow down the possible answers the participant would respond with.

Speech Restoration

While this may seem an exciting idea that will yet again change the way people communicate with one another, the technology actually has promise for the restoring speech in people who have lost the capability, such as those who suffered a stroke, a spinal injury, or a neurodegenerative disease. This is because the brain regions that produce speech typically remain intact in the patients even if they have lost the ability to speak due to facial paralysis.

“With the advances we’ve seen in the field over the past decade it became clear that we might be able to leverage these discoveries to help patients with speech loss, which is one of the most devastating consequences of neurological damage,” said neuroscientist and study coauthor Edward Chang, MD.

Now, researchers are working on discovering whether EcoG neural interface implants can help patients with paralysis to restore a variety of their movement and communication abilities.