The Implant That Decodes Speech and Gestures at Once

A brain-computer interface, or BCI, works by picking up the electrical activity produced when neurons fire and translating patterns in that activity into an output, such as moving a cursor or producing a word. For years, BCIs were built to decode one kind of output at a time: a system tuned to recognise the patterns behind intended speech was not also tuned to recognise the different patterns behind an intended arm or hand movement, because the two kinds of signal look different enough that one decoder was not built to catch both. Researchers eventually found that training a single system to recognise both kinds of patterns side by side let a person's brain activity be turned into speech and gesture from one device, without either interfering with the other.