Dr. Eddie Chang

So we've been studying this patterning of electrical activity for consonants and vowels.

Essentially, once we figured out a lot of these codes for the individual phonetic elements, part of the lab started to focus on this very specific question.

For people who have these kinds of paralysis, could we intercept those signals from the brain, the cerebral cortex, as someone is trying to say those words?

And then can we intercept them and then have them taken out of the brain

through wires to a computer that are going to interpret those signals and translate them into words.

So we started a clinical trial.

It's called the BRAVO trial.

It's still underway.

And the first participant in the BRAVO trial was a man who had been paralyzed for 15 years.

He was in a car accident.

He actually walked out of the hospital the day after that car accident.

But the next day had a complication related to it where he had a very large stroke in the brainstem.

and that turned out to be devastating he didn't wake up from that stroke for about a week he was in a coma for about a week and when he woke up from that coma he realized that he couldn't speak or move his arms or legs as he told me or communicated to us that was absolutely devastating he wanted really to die at that time could he blink his eyes or move his mouth in any way

He could blink his eyes.

He had some limited mouth movements, but couldn't produce any intelligible speech.

He was like completely slurred and incomprehensible.

He survived this injury.

A lot of people who have that kind of stroke just don't survive.

The way he actually communicates, because he has a little bit of residual neck movements, is that he improvised and had his friends basically put a stick attached to his baseball cap

Because he could move his neck, he would essentially type out letters on a keyboard screen to get out words.