For many people living with amyotrophic side sclerosis (SLA), saying “I love you” to a partner or a child is impossible. ALS is a progressive neurological disease that leads to complete paralysis. The first symptoms involve weakness in the arms or legs as well as speeches or difficulties to swallow.
“One in four people already have speech problems when diagnosed,” said David Brandman, co-director of neuroprosthetics lab and neurosurgeon at the University of California-Davis.
As speech paralysis progresses, patients cannot ask for help, ask questions or even thank the people who help them in daily life.
There is no remedy for ALS, and patients generally only live for three to five years after the diagnosis. But scientists recently experienced a major breakthrough with a computer interface that is promising to help SLA patients to live a better quality of life – by giving them their voice.
Learn more:: Stephen Hawking disease: how SLA has an impact on the body and progress in treatment
Live with SLA: signals to speech
In 2025 Study published in Nature, A team of scientists detailed the new computer interface and its effectiveness for Casey, a 46 -year -old California man living with SLA. Casey is fully paralyzed and unable to speak to his wife and daughter. He is a participant in the Braigate2 clinical trial in UC Davis.
Brandman has established four microelectrodes networks in Casey’s brain in the region responsible for speaking. The electrodes feel the activities of brain neurons and transmit information at the brain interface (BCI), which translates the signals into speech.
“We have deeply exhausted his voice so that the computer looks like him when he speaks,” says Brandman. “It looks like him in real time as if the musculature still worked.”
Technology that reads spirits?
Although it may seem that microelectrodes are reading in the mind, the research team says that technology is based on the detection of words that a person means but cannot because of paralysis.
“It is not a mental reading device. I do not listen to your deepest and darkest secrets. It is an artifact of the place where we record in the brain, ”explains Brandman.
BCI is currently a wired device that connects to a computer system parked on a nearby cart. The research team is currently working on a wireless system and plans to reduce the computer system to something in the size of a laptop. Finally, he could be as small as a mobile phone.
“It will become much smaller. It is more on the size of refinement and development. We are still at the Discovery Stadium, ”explains Sergey Stavisky, assistant professor in the neurological surgery department and co-director of the Neuroprosthetic laboratory in UC-Davis.
Translate words and tone
When Casey connects to Braingate2, the sensors are able to translate not only his words but also his tone and his intonation. The researchers noted that it was an important aspect of the design.
“Speech is a fundamental quality of humans, and it is always the fastest mode of communication. The way we talk about us emotion, it is not only the words we say, but how we say that he understands a lot of information, “explains Maitreyee Wairagkar, project scientist in the neuroprosthetic laboratory in UC-Davis.
Casey’s family said it understood 60% of the time. Without the help of Braigate2, they understood only 4% of the time.
BCI like Braingate2 cannot cure ALS, but Brandman says that it can add to the quality of life of a patient, allow them to speak, plan their future and defend themselves. There is also hope that technology could be useful to patients who lose their discourse due to other conditions such as stroke, primary progressive aphasia or locking syndrome.
“It is not a remedy for someone’s SLA, I cannot make someone’s SLA disappear, but it can make someone’s life more significant,” said Brandman.
Braingate clinical trials are Currently recruitment to UC Davis and its four partner institutions.
This article does not offer medical advice and should be used for information purposes only.
Learn more:: A soft fan could help people with SLA to breathe more easily
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Emilie Lucchesi wrote for some of the country’s greatest newspapers, including the New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri and a master’s degree from DEPAUL University. It also has a doctorate. In communication from the University of Illinois-Chicago by emphasizing the framing of the media, the construction of messages and the communication of stigmatization. Emilie is the author of three non-fiction books. His third, a light in the dark: survive more than Ted Bundy, released on October 3, 2023 from Chicago Review Press and is co-written with the survivor Kathy Kleiner Rubin.
