Home

On:

 Researchers in Belgium have developed a technique that allows coma patients that are in a minimally-conscious state to become aware enough to communicate — for up to a week — using mild electrical stimulation to their brains.

Building on the results of a 2014 study that showed that electrical stimulation of the brain could briefly help raise the state of awareness in coma patients, a research team from Belgium’s University of Liège performed a similar experiment using longer sessions, where 16 participants, either in a minimally conscious or vegetative state, were given 20-minute treatments for five days.
read more

On:

A new device developed by a research team at UC Berkeley is able to produce mechanical speech using only the thought of the word being produced from the subject. The researchers hope that this device will enable patients suffering from conditions that limit or prohibit spoken communication, such as the effects from a stroke or Lou Gehrig’s disease, to be able to communicate normally.

The researchers placed electrodes on the surface of the subjects’ brains in the region associated with language, then recorded the electrical patterns their brains produced when perceiving spoken speech. This information was then applied to a computer model that sorted out which patterns belonged to which sounds, creating maps of the subjects’ perceived speech patterns.
read more