Project Summary / Abstract Patients who suffer from debilitating neuromuscular disorders (e.g. amyotrophic lateral sclerosis – ALS, Locked- in-Syndrome – LIS, and muscular dystrophies/myopathies) have difficulty or an inability to communicate through speech leading to a detrimental loss in quality of life. Current technology using eye movements and signals/spellers from electroencephalography (EEG) are slow and inconsistent. Neural prostheses offer an opportunity to produce fast and accurate communication for patients suffering from neuromuscular disorders, but success for regaining speech has been limited due to technological limitations: there is an inability to capture the high dimensionality of the brain and an inability to record in naturalistic conditions using fully implanted, wireless electrode arrays. To solve these challenges, we develop and optimize custom wireless micro- electrocorticographic (µECoG) arrays with over 1,000 channels to decode speech directly from the human brain. We will accomplish this by 1) Testing and optimizing the spatial resolution of µECoG to capture neural signals, 2) Fine-tune our machine learning algorithms to decode speech directly from the brain and 3) developing wireless technology to enable neural prosthetic usage in naturalistic settings. High-density, high channel-count neural interfaces will offer an unprecedented ability to decode speech from the human brain. This ability combined with wireless technology, will allow for a new generation of speech neural prostheses.

Project Narrative This project seeks to design, test, and optimize a novel wireless recording array for a neural speech prosthetic. Patients with various types of motor disorders such as Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and Locked-in- Syndrome (LOS) can have difficulty or an inability to communicate. We aim to restore this ability by reading signals directly from the brain and translating them into speech. We will design and test novel high density, high channel-count electrodes to read from the brain at an unprecedented spatial scale. We will also develop wireless technology to enable this speech translation during everyday usage. With our advanced technology for reading the brain, we aim to literally give a voice to the voiceless.