Dr. Eddie Chang

In fact, this is how he communicated was through a device that he would essentially peck out letters one by one by moving his neck to control this stick attached to his baseball cap.

He hadn't really spoken for about 15 years.

Oh, goodness.

Yeah.

So it was part of a clinical trial.

It was, you know, something that our hospital and also the FDA, you know, had to approve and looked at very carefully.

But given a lot of the work that we had done, there were some basis for why this might work.

And so we did a surgery where we implanted electrodes onto these areas that control the vocal tract, the areas that control the larynx, the areas that control the lips and tongue and jaw movements when we normally speak.

These are areas that presumably may be active.

That was our hope.

and he underwent a surgery a brain surgery we put an electrode array and we connected it to a port that was called to screw to his skull and the port actually goes through his scalp and he's lived with this now for the last three years so he has an electrode array that's implanted over the part of this brain that's important for speech it's connected to a port

And then we connect a wire to that port that translates those what we call analog brainwaves and converts them into digital signals.

We put them through machine learning or artificial intelligence algorithm that can pick up these very, very subtle signals.

patterns you can actually see them with your eye in the brain activity and translate those into words and this is something that took weeks to train the algorithm to interpret it correctly but what was incredible about it was to see how he reacted he would be prompted to say a given word like you know outside for example

And then he would think about it, try to say it, and finally those words would appear on the screen.

And what was really amazing about it was you could really tell that he got a kick out of it because his body would shake in a way and his head would shake in a way that he would start to giggle.

That was cool to see.

But then I also realized that when he was giggling, it kind of screwed up the next words decoding.

No, we haven't fixed that.

It's easier just to tell him to stop giggling.