Researchers create talking throat patch for people with voice disorders

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, have built a soft, adhesive patch capable of turning throat movements into speech.

The patch, written about in a paper published in Nature Communications on Tuesday, is made out of a material that converts motion into electricity. This material, developed by the UCLA team in 2021, could be a game-changer for sensors and wearables limited by their power sources. 

The device sticks to the throat, converting the person’s throat muscle maneuvers into electrical signals. Those signals power the device, and are also fed into a machine-learning algorithm that is trained to match the throat movements to specific words. The device then projects those words through its speaker.

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