Brain-computer interfaces can potentially restore autonomy to people with paralysis, including the ability to control their own environment via smart devices in the home. BCI applications for controlling smart devices to date have required visual displays or auditory cues, limiting the user’s ability to autonomously and privately issue commands. In this study, a clinical trial participant with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) used a chronically implanted electrocorticographic (ECoG) BCI to control smart devices with self-paced silent speech commands.
Across 18 experimental sessions, silently mimed speech commands were detected in real time and decoded with a median accuracy of 97.1% (chance: 7.14%) and the median correct decodes per minute was 11.86. These results demonstrate that silently attempted speech can be reliably decoded without exogenous timing cues, supporting the feasibility of reliable autonomous smart device control with an implantable BCI. The authors would like to express their gratitude to participant CC01 and his family.
The authors thank Alpa Uchil and the rest of the ALS clinic at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Johns Hopkins ALS Clinical Trials Unit for their care of the participant and their input on ALS-related topics; Mathijs Raemaekers and Kevin Nathan for fMRI data analysis; Yujing Wang for support in brain reconstruction and functional mapping; Ziwei Ouyang, Qinwan Rabbani, and Samyak Shah for help with data collection; Brock Wester for help with illustrations. The authors were supported by the National Institutes of Health under award number UHSNS114439 (NINDS). Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA Shiyu Luo, Daniel N.
Candrea & Kimberley Wyse-Sookoo Department of Neurology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA Miguel Angrick, Christopher Coogan, Rohit Ganji, Donna C. Crone Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery, UMC Utrecht Brain Center, Utrecht, The Netherlands Anouck Schippers, Mariska J. Ramsey Research and Exploratory Development Department, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, MD, USA Griffin W.
Fifer Department of Neurosurgery, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA Department of Plastic Surgery, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA Department of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA Center for Language and Speech Processing, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA The authors declare no competing interests. Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.
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