New technology to aid speech opens world of opportunity (Editorial)
If only we could make things happen by imagining them.
It’s the stuff of dreams, really. From a child’s thought of making her bothersome brother disappear with nothing besides the force of her will to a grown-up’s consideration of telekinesis, the powers of an individual’s mind have long fascinated.
Now, as though by magic, scientists have developed technology that allows someone who has lost the ability to speak to think of a word and then have it appear on a computer screen.
Really. Truly. Consider that.
The details of the newly announced case are astonishing, no matter how one looks at it, but they need to be seen as just the beginning. As reported in a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, have been testing an implantable device that is attached to the outside of one’s brain and allows words imagined to be displayed on a computer screen. The device has been tested by a man in his 30s who lost his ability to speak after he was paralyzed from a stroke he suffered some 15 years back.
Though the vocabulary is exceedingly limited -- it’s currently a mere 50 words -- and the accuracy rate still quite low -- 76% when word-prediction algorithms are utilized and just 47% without them -- the achievement provides more than a hint of what could be possible ahead.
There’s often good reason to be fearful of the likely nefarious uses of technology by less-than scrupulous actors. One needn’t think too long, or too hard, about the ways that facial recognition could be employed by, say, the Chinese Communist Party to become plenty worried, and quickly, too.
But then along comes an astonishing report like the one on the development of word-recognition technology. There could one day be a device that will allow those who’ve lost the ability to speak, whether from accident or illness, to communicate again through the use of technology. Such won’t be in widespread use tomorrow, or anytime soon thereafter, but it’s suddenly so much more than just a dream.
Imagine that.
Though there are devices that allow those without speech to spell out words, one letter at a time, such is obviously time consuming and difficult. The current path: From single letters to complete words to who knows what’s next.
Now we’re talking.
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