There are few things more annoying than having to use your television remote to login to a video streaming service. The process of manually selecting each character one at a time via a virtual keyboard on your screen is irritatingly cumbersome.
Now imagine if that was the only way you could communicate your thoughts to others.
For people who have lost the ability to speak and have limited hand mobility due to a disorder like ALS or a spinal cord injury, that’s their reality.
They rely on gaze-tracking technology where a camera follows their eye movements as they look at an on-screen keyboard. To select a letter, they must focus on it briefly before moving to the next one. Having to spell out words and phrases this way can cause eye fatigue.
“When people who have to use assistive communication tools that are very laborious, they get in a situation where it becomes just tiring to communicate,” said Matt Angle, the founder of a brain chip startup that is working on a solution to this problem. “And so they don’t have casual conversations with their loved ones as much as they used to. It ends up being very goal oriented, very needs driven.”
Angle is the CEO and founder of the Austin-based brain chip startup Paradromics, which is currently developing a brain-computer interface (BCI) that can read the brain signals of people who have lost their ability to speak and interpret those signals into their intended speech.
Founded in 2015, a year before its rival Neuralink, Paradromics has raised $87 million in venture investment and $18 million in public funding. Its device, the Connexus Direct Data Interface, has been granted two “Breakthrough Device Designations” by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), fast-tracking its review process.
This month, the FDA also accepted Paradromics into its Total Product Life Cycle Advisory Program, providing the company the opportunity to get regular feedback from the agency as it prepares for human clinical trials.
Angle said he expects to get regulatory approval and have the company’s first patient enrolled in a trial around this time next year.
How does the Connexus work
Paradromics’s brain-computer interface system, the Connexus, is made up of three components. The device’s small round cortical module sits on top of the surface of the brain with 421 microelectrodes — thinner than a strand of human hair — that stick out from the bottom and extend 1.5 millimeters into the brain. This allows the Connexus to record data from hundreds and thousands of single neurons, unlike devices that are placed outside of the skull or in a blood vessel.
Angle said that for devices that aren’t directly connected to the brain, reading signals from neurons would be like trying to record individual conversations happening inside a football stadium’s bleachers from the parking lot.
The chip is connected by a flexible wire down the inside of the neck to an internal transceiver that is implanted in the chest which sends information to an external transceiver. The whole system is powered wirelessly.
Although other devices can also record data from single neurons like Blackrock Neurotech’s Utah Array and Neuralink’s Telepathy, the Connexus was designed specifically to last for more than 10 years in the human body.
“We’ve been really thoughtful in the design of our system to use materials, use packaging, and even just the general form factor of the device, all these things have been vetted in the past in other medical devices,” said Angle. “So that we know that whatever we’re putting in a patient next year is going to be safe, and it’s going to be effective for many years.”
For people who have lost their ability to speak, implanting a Paradromics chip into their motor cortex — the area of the brain that controls the muscles that produce speech — could be a game changer. Whenever people speak, neurons in the motor cortex send signals that tell vocal chords, lips, and tongue what they should be doing.
For some people who have lost their ability to speak, these signals still remain intact but just can’t reach their muscles, due to a weakening of both the muscle themselves and of the nerve cells responsible for sending messages to them.
“But if you take a Paradromics’s chip and you put it in that area, it can record the single neuron signals. And if you record a lot of single neuron signals, then from other clinical trials with other devices we know that you can infer what the person was trying to say,” said Angle. “And then you can take that decoded inference and you can have a computer produce the speech for them.”
The brain chip revolution
Angle likes to compare recent advances in brain chips with the development of the internet.
In the late 1980s, modem speeds were so slow that the internet was primarily text based. In the early 2000s, once modem speeds started picking up, the internet turned into a more visual, image-based medium. And in the 2010s with high-speed internet, video streaming became widely available, turning the internet into a video medium.
Angle said that until recently, brain chips were stuck in the 1980s with devices like the bulkier Utah Array, which was invented in 1989 and was first used in a human in 2004. But now Connexus and Neuralink chips are bringing the technology into a new era.
“So if people are really impressed with the kinds of developments that have happened in [brain-computer interface] over the last 20 or 30 years, they’re going to be even more impressed by what happens over the next 10 years,” Angle said.
Beyond helping people regain their ability to speak and control computer devices, Angle envisions a future where brain chips can help people with visual impairments and even mental health disorders.
Eventually, these aids could potentially surpass natural human abilities and open the market outside of medical care to people who want superhuman abilities.
“I think what will happen is all these capabilities that we’ll develop for people with disabilities will become so advanced that there will be people without disabilities that become interested,” Angle predicted. “And then I think it’s more of a societal question, of whether we want to allow it because it will technically exist.”