First patient with a Paradromics implant speaks in real time: chooses her own words and calls her grandchildren
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A brain implant has given a person back living speech: she decides what to say and talks to loved ones in her own words.
A woman in her sixties from Michigan with progressive motor neuron disease is the first participant in the Connect-One study with the fully implantable wireless Connexus device (421 microelectrodes). Instead of preset phrases, she composed her own utterances, answered open-ended questions and talked on the phone with her grandchildren; the system decoded her first sentence, "Okay, I have a lot to say," in real time without errors. According to Paradromics, the information transfer rate exceeds 200 bits/s versus about 40 bits/s in ordinary speech, and the researchers found different neural signatures for attempted and imagined speech. The study is running at three centers (UC Davis, Mass General Brigham, University of Michigan Health) under an FDA authorization from November 2025; according to RuntimeWire, since August participants have been allowed to connect personal laptops, tablets and phones.