TL;DR
For many people with ALS, talking can come to mean looking at letters on an eye-tracking tablet, and eye trackers tire and fail as the disease progresses. Cognixion, a Santa Barbara company, is now enrolling 30 adults with ALS to take a different kind of device home: a head-worn reader of brain signals that needs no surgery, paired with see-through augmented-reality glasses and AI built around each user. For 12 weeks, every participant gets to choose, session by session, between their own eye tracker, the brain-signal headset and a touchscreen version, and the main result is simply which one they reach for. The National Institutes of Health is paying for all of it. If people living with ALS freely pick a brain interface they can put on like a pair of glasses, the road to talking by thought opens up for everyone who would never want a chip in their skull. To see our odds on when a no-surgery brain interface reaches people with ALS, and the timeline of breakthroughs that leads there, subscribe.
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