Speech therapy

Severely disabled people with medical conditions such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — the most common form of motor neuron disease — are often confined to a wheelchair due to the degeneration of their motor neurons, the nerve cells in the central nervous system that control muscle movement.

This means that not only do they lack the ability to move but may also lose their speech.

Now, a small team of US engineers led by Michael Callahan and Thomas Coleman from the

is developing a system it believes could ultimately restore both movement and speech to sufferers.

The system — dubbed The Audeo — is a sensory device that is placed around a patient's neck to intercept the signals from the brain that control vocal chords and the vocal tract.

These signals are sent to a computer that filters out the sound from any background noise using a signal processing algorithm that interprets the individual's meaning to produce speech. This can then either be output directly or used to control a wheelchair or other external devices.