Machine Translates Thoughts Into Speech

An anonymous reader points to this explanation of a brain-machine interface for real-time synthetic speech production, which has been successfully tested in a 26-year-old patient. From the article: "Signals collected from an electrode in the speech motor cortex are amplified and sent wirelessly across the scalp as FM radio signals. The Neuralynx System amplifies, converts, and sorts the signals. The neural decoder then translates the signals into speech commands for the speech synthesizer."

Comments

Volunteer?

[Itninja]

They keep referring to the patient in the test as a 'volunteer' but also state that he was "paralyzed except for slow vertical movement of the eyes." So he what? Signed the release forms by slowly looking up and down? I am guessing they mean volunteer as in 'his guardian(s) "volunteered" him'.