Researchers Create Throat Patch to Aid Individuals With Voice Disorders Talk

Many innovations are created by scientists to improve our quality of life. Scientists have just discovered a flexible device that, when worn around the neck, can convert facial muscles into words, enabling voiceless communication.

Reports state that the tiny patch not only recognizes the motions of the neck connected to speech, but also uses those movements to produce power. This revolutionary device operates without a connection or battery. The gadget was just discovered in research that was published in the journal Nature Communications on March 12. The study indicates that this technology will help people who have voice problems due to paralyzed or wounded vocal cords communicate, as well as those recovering from surgery related to throat cancer.

It was created by researchers at the University of California to improve the lives of those with speech impairments. This patch may be externally worn around the neck. This versatile gadget detects and generates sound based on the movements of the neck muscles.

In the meantime, Jun Chen, an assistant professor of bioengineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a recent interview with the media that he felt his voice becoming fatigued after giving a lecture for many hours and that’s when he had the idea for the patch. He said he was trying to come up with a solution to this issue so that a person may communicate without utilizing their vocal cords, often referred to as vocal folds.

The original design of the patch was created in 2021 and published in the journal Nature Materials. The team has now finished this patch that reacts to the minute amount of stress that the movement of the neck muscles places on it. When a person wants to talk, the gadget responds quickly by producing electrical impulses that are then translated into speech.

The patch consists of five very thin layers. The outside layers of the patch are made of a soft, flexible silicon material, while the center layer, which is made of silicon and micromagnets, produces a magnetic field that varies in response to the movement of the neck muscles. Its two surrounding layers, composed of copper wire coils, transform these variations in the magnetic field into electrical impulses. These electrical impulses are then received by a machine-learning system, which translates the pulses into speech.

Each study participant used a neck device to observe the software while repeating five short sentences 100 times each to train the algorithm. This trained the algorithm to link certain motions to a particular sentence. Nonetheless, the software converted the electrical impulses from the patch into speech with around 95% accuracy in a test of the technique, including eight participants who did not have speech issues.