Brain implant allows paralysed man to type up to 90 characters per minute by just thinking about them

• Scientists have developed a brain implant that allows patient to type by just thinking words.
• The implant allowed the patient to type up to 90 characters in a minute.
• This development will allow patients to communicate faster.

In a new development in brain-computer interface (BCI) technology, scientists at Stanford University used a brain implant on a man, whose hands were paralysed due to spinal cord injury, allowing him to type up to 90 characters in a minute by just thinking. According to the research that was published earlier this year, the brain implant helped type with 94.1% raw accuracy online, and greater than 99% accuracy offline with a general-purpose autocorrect.

This development is a major improvement on previous implants that allowed users to type on a digital keyboard by using their thoughts to move the cursor on specific characters. With the latest implant, patients just have to think of words to type and communicate faster.

How does it work?

Most BCI implants allow patients to restore their motor skills, such as reaching and grasping, or point-and-click typing with a computer cursor. To achieve thought-to-text communication, scientists have developed an intracortical BCI that “decodes attempted handwriting movements from neural activity in the motor cortex and translates it to text in real-time, using a recurrent neural network decoding approach.”

This means that the implant allows the patient to think about writing the word they want to type and then it translates that into text in real-time for effective communication.

Implants for future

According to Krishna Shenoy, a neuroscientist and engineer in this research, the implants should be able to achieve a wider variety of tasks in the future. However, to make it commercially viable, scientists will need to safely insert more electrodes in the brain and make the surgery more affordable.

“The brain has about 86 billion neurons, but scientists are currently only able to record signals from less than a few thousand of them,” Shenoy said. Although this development was part of a research study, it opens doors to achieve a multitude of tasks using brain implants in the future.

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