National Institutes of Health · Tuesday, September 15, 2026

NIH-funded team shows a brain implant that can drive speech and gestures together

The File desk · Sep 15, 2026, 2:08 PM UTCShare

Scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health showed a brain-computer interface that can turn thoughts into speech and upper-body gestures at the same time. An NIH news release dated Sept. 14 says a University of California, San Francisco team used machine learning to read brain activity in three patients with paralysis. The system guided a full-body virtual avatar for two participants. Edward Chang, a UCSF neurosurgery professor and the study’s corresponding author, said conversation is more than words and that the work is a proof of concept for restoring more natural expression. The release says past devices often handled speech or gestures separately, and that training on simultaneous speech-and-gesture data worked better than training on each alone. The study appears in Nature Neuroscience. Debara Tucci, director of NIH’s National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, said the results give hope that people with severe paralysis could regain more of everyday communication. The team plans to test a fully implantable wireless version next.