Man With ALS Uses At-Home Brain-Computer Interface for Nearly Two Years Without Researcher Support

Summary

A UC Davis-led team, in collaboration with Brown University and Mass General Brigham, reported in Nature Medicine that a man with severe paralysis and dysarthria from ALS independently used an intracortical brain-computer interface at home for nearly two years, accumulating more than 3,800 hours of use. The system decoded attempted speech into text from a vocabulary of over 125,000 words and enabled cursor control, allowing the participant to communicate with family, browse the internet, and maintain full-time employment. Across more than 180,000 sentences produced during real-world use, 92% were rated as correct or mostly correct, addressing two longstanding barriers to practical BCI use: independent at-home operation and reliable long-term performance.