Green light for Neuralink implants

Elon Musk's medical device company Neuralink announced on September 19 that it was beginning to recruit volunteers for a first-in-human clinical trial of its brain implants, after receiving approval from an independent institutional review board and an unnamed hospital center that It is where these implementations will be carried out.

The trials will last six years, Neuralink is looking for people over 22 years old, with spinal conditions or with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, people who have had that condition for at least a year and have a permanent and reliable caregiver, this is because the first The objective of implants is to help these people with problems moving or handling instruments, thus implants should serve to control devices and appliances with thought.

To do this, the implants will be inserted in an area of the brain that controls the intention of movement, a surgical robot will do it. By the way, we must get used to surgical robots first because operations increasingly require greater precision, a precision that exceeds capabilities. human and second because training an expert surgeon can require years of effort and practice, while a medical robot only needs to be introduced with the appropriate program for the operation.

Neuralink is not the first company to create implants and it is not the most advanced, other companies already work with humans and have achieved surprising results, such as the recent cases of a woman with paralysis and another with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS who have recovered their speech. thanks to brain implants.

The implants translate brain activity into words. This has been achieved thanks to a brain-computer interface. An artificial intelligence algorithm receives and decodes the electronic information coming from the brain. It is amazing, because this artificial intelligence manages to detect and differentiate attempts to formulate words. 39 phonemes that end up forming words, it was not easy in one of the cases, 25 sessions of 4 hours each were needed to train the Artificial Intelligence, even so the error rate was 23.8%, for a vocabulary of 125 a thousand words, but it was enough for the patient to establish a dialogue with another person.

The system is further completed with a digital avatar and a voice synthesizer that manages to imitate the sound and tone of voice that the person had before losing their voice. The new devices generate text at an average of 78 to 62 words per minute, It can be a bit slow (normal conversation is about 160 words per minute), but it is still a magnificent improvement over previous systems.

The achievement has been achieved thanks to teams from Stanford University and the University of California in San Francisco, robotic surgeons, brain implants, recovering voice and movement, what do you think of all this new medicine

Thank you for visiting my blog. If you like posts about #science, #planet, #politics, #rights #crypto, #traveling and discovering secrets and beauties of the #universe, feel free to Follow me as these are the topics I write about the most. Have a wonderful day and stay on this great platform :) :)

! The truth will set us free and science is the one that is closest to the truth!