A team of UK scientists has developed a headset that may bring voices back to people who have lost their speech as a consequence of injury, cancer, stroke, and other maladies. They hope the prototype — which uses magnets positioned within the user’s mouth or tongue — will take where of low-tech solutions like throat valves, that have the tendency to get clogged. When she or he speaks, changes to the magnets’ movements are detected by the device, which associates specific facial movements with corresponding words (the device currently has a vocabulary of about 50). Everything continues to be pretty clunky, as evidenced by the picture at right, however the researchers are engaged on cramming the technology right into a device roughly the scale of a Bluetooth headset . They’re also engaged on how to implant magnets into the tongue of the wearer — positioning the magnets within the wearer’s mouth is proving to be one of the crucial largest difficulties in implementing the technology.
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