Brain-machine interface helps aphasia patients talk

A patient who sustained aphasia due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis has regained the ability to communicate after receiving a brain-machine interface implant, a hospital in Beijing announced on Thursday.

Doctors at the Xuanwu Hospital of Capital Medical University said they have completed the world's first human implantations of a device called the NeuCyber Matrix BMI System, which enables an aphasic patient who has lost the ability to speak to communicate, in much the same way that renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, who had ALS, was able to communicate with his speech-generating device.

The semi-invasive, wireless brain-machine interface implant was independently developed in China. It features a flexible, high-density electrode applied to the cortex that records, processes and transmits brain signals with a high sampling rate, high throughput and low power consumption.