An ALS patient set a record for communicating via a brain implant: 62 words per minute

The new research was carried out at Stanford University. The preprint, published January 21, began drawing extra attention on Twitter and other social media because of the death this week of its co-lead author, Krishna Shenoy, from pancreatic cancer. Shenoy had devoted his career to improving the speed of communication through brain interfaces, carefully maintaining a list of records on his laboratory website. In 2019, another volunteer Shenoy worked with managed to use his thoughts to type at a rate of 18 words a minute, a record performance at the time, as we related in MIT Technology Review's special issue on computing. The brain-computer interfaces that Shenoy's team works with involve a small pad of sharp electrodes embedded in a person's motor cortex, the brain region most involved in movement.