AI is Doing the Impossible By Turning Brainwaves into Speech

Author(s): Caden Ornt

Originally published on Towards AI.

AI is being used to help stroke victims regain their ability to communicate in the most unlikely of ways. Here’s how it works.
Image generated by DALL-E

Artificial intelligence is slowly working its way deeper into the practice of medicine in a number of ways.

A group of researchers in the Netherlands may, however, have developed one of the most intriguing implementations of them all. Their paper, which will be linked at the bottom of this article, was published in the Journal of Neural Engineering and outlines their method for using AI to predict speech based solely on neural activity.

This technology is being produced primarily for stroke victims who suffer from paralysis, which prevents them from speaking. However, there are many other potential use cases, such as patients with motor neuron disease.

Given our ever-increasing understanding of the human body, you would assume that strokes are becoming less and less common. However, quite startlingly, this is not the case.

According to the CDC, over 795,000 people will suffer from a stroke annually in the United States alone.

While these strokes have the potential to be fatal, even patients who live must suffer from the long-term consequences that can be caused by them. For this reason, the CDC lists strokes as a “leading cause of serious long-term disability.”

Figure created by the author

As referenced in the figure above, about a… Read the full blog for free on Medium.

Join thousands of data leaders on the AI newsletter. Join over 80,000 subscribers and keep up to date with the latest developments in AI. From research to projects and ideas. If you are building an AI startup, an AI-related product, or a service, we invite you to consider becoming a sponsor.

Published via Towards AI