Neuroscience: Brain implant brings speech and gestures together (Nature Neuroscience)

A single brain implant that can simultaneously decode speech and gestures in people with paralysis is reported in Nature Neuroscience. The findings represent a step towards brain–computer interfaces that enable more natural communication for people with paralysis.

Natural human communication often combines speech with gestures, such as a wave, nod or other upper-body movement. Stroke and neurodegenerative diseases, including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, can impair both speech and body movement, reducing a person’s ability to interact socially. Brain–computer interfaces aim to restore lost functions by translating brain activity into commands for external devices, but previous research has mostly focused on speech or movement separately.

Edward Chang and colleagues recorded neural activity from three participants with vocal-tract and limb paralysis using brain implants placed over the sensorimotor cortex. They first showed that a single implant could capture signals linked to several movement types, including upper-limb and speech-related mouth and face movements (such as shrugging, fist pumps or nodding the head). In two participants, the authors then used parallel speech and gesture decoders to animate a full-body avatar: the participants were asked to attempt specific gestures, respond to conversational prompts, or both. In conversational tasks, the system accurately decoded speech and gestures in both participants: one participant achieved median accuracies of 100% for both speech and gesture decoding across three conversational blocks.

The authors found that training the system using both speech and gestures together improved performance and reduced mistakes. They note that testing in more participants and with larger sets of words and gestures will be needed before the technology can be used in practice.

• Article
• Open access
• Published: 14 September 2026

Brosler, S.C., Liu, J.R., Silva, A.B. et al. Simultaneous speech and gesture decoding for multimodal communication in paralysis. Nat Neurosci (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-026-02446-2

© 2026 Springer Nature Limited. All Rights Reserved.  

More Press Releases