Home Department: Symbolic Systems
Mentor: Jaimie Henderson (Neurosurgery)

“Coding a Decoding App"

Motor speech disorders trap individuals’ thoughts in their mind, limiting—and often preventing—them from communicating with their loved ones. Prosthetics can record single brain neurons, and with sufficient processing, scientists can predict attempted, incoherent words with high accuracy in real time. However, this preliminary technology has not reached its full capacity. Loran will program a platform that synchronizes recorded activity with stimuli in real time, expediting hours-long computation post-testing and allowing more data collection. This platform will evaluate verbal fluency to stimulate different brain regions. More data from varying locations in the brain will further improve the accuracy of decoding attempted speech.