#brain-computer-interface

#brain-computer-interface

Given these and other recent milestones, Peng says it's realistic to think that at least one BCI system could gain approval in China by 2027. Minmin Luo, director of the Chinese Institute for Brain Research (CIBR) in Beijing, agrees that the country is well on its way to meeting the goals set out by the new policy document. "It is basically an engineering project, with not so ambitious goals. Already, there are so many people working on it," he says.

Once the mental privacy safeguard was in place, the team started testing their inner speech system with cued words first. The patients sat in front of the screen that displayed a short sentence and had to imagine saying it. The performance varied, reaching 86 percent accuracy with the best performing patient and on a limited vocabulary of 50 words, but dropping to 74 percent when the vocabulary was expanded to 125,000 words.

"Our main goal is creating a flexible speech neuroprosthesis that enables a patient with paralysis to speak as fluently as possible, managing their own cadence, and be more expressive by letting them modulate their intonation," says Maitreyee Wairagkar, a neuroprosthetics researcher at UC Davis who led the study.