Something unbelievable happened at the Wyss Center in Geneva, Swisswhere a man has been lying in bed paralyzed for years because of lateral sclerosis Amyotrophic (ALS), he was able to communicate with his family via electrodes surgically implanted in his brain. Your first request? A beer. The 36yearold has been able to ask to listen to music, get a head massage from his mum and order curry thanks to technology that allows him to form sentences at the rhythm of a single character per minute. All through the power of thought and to these electrodes, which convert brain activity into commands.
“Ours explained the doctor Jonas Zimmerman, neuroscientists at the Wyss Center is the first study to enable communication from someone who has lost voluntary movement and for whom the BCI is now the only means of communication.” Again, “This study answers a longstanding question of whether humans with complete blockade syndrome who have lost all voluntary muscle control, including eye or mouth movement also lose the capacity of their brain to generate commands for communication “.
The road to such success was not a short one. In fact, the patient applied for a brain implant in 2018. It took another three months to arrive at a configuration that would allow the patient to use brain signals to generate a binary response to a spelling program. Then again three weeks to produce the first few sentences.
