Brain Chip Blackrock Neurotech Successfully Recovers Speech Ability To Patients With Nervous Disorders

Electrodes installed in the patient's brain (photo: dock. Blackrock Neurotech)

JAKARTA Blackrock Neurotech, the pioneer of the Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) implanting business, managed to recover the ability to speak in paralyzed patients. This success was published in a medical journal on August 14. The company owned by Elon Musk conducted research on male patients with an Amyotropic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) complaint or a disease affecting motor nerve cells in the brain. This patient has long lost the ability to speak. Reporting from Reuters, this 45-year-old patient has an average speed of about seven minutes only to say one word. This ability is very far from the average English conversation, which produces 160 words every minute. The researchers finally put a text-to-speech brain implant made by Blackrock Neurotech into the patient. They embed four microelectrodes using 256 intracortractical electrodes to record neural activity in the brain. After the BCI technology was grown, on the second day of the study, the patient was able to communicate using 125,000 vocabularies. The words the brain wants to say will be displayed on the screen, then the software will voice the text received.

The resulting voice did not sound rigid because the researchers used the original voice of the patient before suffering from ALS. From the transcript shared in the research journal, the patient admitted that he was happy with the results of chip installation in his brain. "I made fun of you (the researcher) to lighten the mood. Please understand my attempt to joke because I really miss making jokes," said the patient. "I am very happy to be able to talk to my friends and family again." After 16 hours of use, the technology installed in the brain can help patients to talk about 32 words per minute. This technology still has errors, but only 2.5 percent of the total words the patient tries to say.