AI brain implant helps Sask. woman speak for the 1st time in 18 years

globalnews.ca:

Ann Johnson was just 30 years old when she experienced a stroke in 2005 that left her paralyzed and unable to speak. At the time, she was a math and P.E. teacher at Luther College in Regina, had an eight-year-old stepson and had recently welcomed a baby girl into the world.

“Overnight, everything was taken from me,” she wrote, according to a post from Luther College.

The stroke left her with locked-in syndrome (LIS), a rare neurological disorder that can cause full paralysis except for the muscles that control eye movement, the National Institutes of Health writes.

Johnson, now 47, described her experience with LIS in a paper she wrote for a psychology class in 2020, typed letter by letter.

“You’re fully cognizant, you have full sensation, all five senses work, but you are locked inside a body where no muscles work,” she wrote. “I learned to breathe on my own again, I now have full neck movement, my laugh returned, I can cry and read and over the years my smile has returned, and I am able to wink and say a few words.”

A year later, in 2021, Johnson learned of a research study that had the potential to change her life. She was selected as one of eight participants for the clinical trial, offered by the departments of neurology and neurosurgery at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and was the only Canadian.

“I always knew that my injury was rare, and living in Regina was remote. My kids were young when my stroke happened, and I knew participating in a study would mean leaving them. So, I waited until this summer to volunteer – my kids are now 25 and 17,” she writes.

Now, the results of Johnson’s work with a team of U.S. neurologists and computer scientists have come to fruition.

A study published in