Speech Restoration

Losing the ability to speak is often one of the most disabling symptoms of neurologic disease. For people with ALS, brainstem stroke, and other related conditions, the cortical areas that control language and speech are intact but cannot transmit their signals to the motor structures that produce speech. Through research discovering the neural signals responsible for speech production, and by utilizing cutting-edge machine learning techniques to generate advanced decoding algorithms, our research team is developing a system to restore fluent communication for people that have lost the ability to speak. As we learn how to decode intended speech directly from the cortex, signals will be paired with text-generating or synthetic speech-generating devices to restore fluent conversational speech for people affected by neurologic injury or disease.