Restoring rapid natural bimanual typing with a neuroprosthesis after paralysis.

A neuroprosthesis decoding attempted finger movements achieves 110 characters per minute with 1.6% error in two individuals with paralysis.

• Why it matters: Restoring natural, high-speed communication methods like typing can significantly improve quality of life for people with paralysis, addressing a critical gap in assistive technology.
• What they did: Researchers developed an intracortical brain-computer interface (iBCI) that uses as few as 30 calibration sentences and a 5-gram language model to decode bimanual finger movements for QWERTY typing in two clinical trial participants.
• The result: The neuroprosthesis enables typing speeds comparable to able-bodied individuals, surpasses current hand motor iBCI decoding throughput, and offers an intuitive, familiar communication paradigm for users with paralysis.