Over time, people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and other neurological conditions can lose their ability to move and speak. A consortium led by a Mass General Brigham neurologist has developed and successfully tested a way to help these patients communicate again.
“Not being able to communicate is so frustrating and demoralizing. It’s like you’re trapped,” Casey Harrell, a 45-year-old with ALS, said during a recent report on WBZ News, the Boston-area CBS affiliate.
Thanks to the BrainGate research consortium, Casey was recently able to communicate via speech again — with a computer-generated version of his very own, pre-ALS voice. The system uses neuroscience and artificial intelligence to translate brain activity into words, sentences, and phrases.
Lead investigator Leigh Hochberg, MD, PhD, director of BrainGate and of the Center for Neurotechnology and Neurorecovery at Massachusetts General Hospital, believes the technology can help many more people with similar conditions speak and move again.
BrainGate turns thoughts into action
ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, is a neurodegenerative condition. People with ALS progressively lose muscle control, including in the muscles we use to speak. The BrainGate mission involves “turning thought into action” for people with paralysis. This includes people with ALS, spinal cord injury, brainstem stroke, muscular dystrophy, and other neurological disorders or injuries.
In July 2023, the BrainGate research team at University of California – Davis placed four tiny electrodes into Casey’s left precentral gyrus, the part of the brain responsible for coordinating speech. The devices gather data from brain activity, then transfer the data to a computer. The computer then translates the data into words, sentences, and phrases. Using a previous recording of Casey’s voice, the team programmed the computer to speak and sound like him.
The final result: The brain-computer interface was able to translate his thoughts into speech within minutes, with 97% accuracy. The recent research was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, and further detailed on their podcast.
The moment when Casey first communicated in his own voice again was not only a scientific breakthrough — it was an emotional and rewarding moment for him, his family, and the research team.
“Seeing his and his family’s emotional reaction … that was an important moment for all of us. The research team that was there, everybody had to pause after seeing it work, right at the beginning, and gather themselves for a moment to continue the rest of the day,” Dr. Hochberg said.
The future for people with neurodegenerative disease
The consortium also is working to translate neural signals into data that can help paralyzed people move a computer cursor or a limb. Dr. Hochberg hopes the breakthroughs may eventually restore more and more people’s mobility and speech.
“I meet people who yesterday were able to walk and speak without any difficulty and suddenly have lost the ability to move or lost the ability to speak. As a physician, I want nothing more than to be able to say to that person, ‘I’m sorry that this happened. But we have this technology, and tomorrow, you’re going to be able to move again. You’re going to be able to speak again.’”
(CAUTION: Investigational Device. Limited by Federal law to investigational use.)
