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Associated Press
09-07-2025
- Health
- Associated Press
Neurological Takeover: NURO Gives Voice to the Voiceless by Controlling Third-Party Eye Gaze Software — Without Gaze
In a world-first, NURO enables a locked-in anoxic brain injury patient to interface with Smartbox's GRID 3 — without eye movement, speech, or physical input. WATERLOO, ONTARIO, CANADA, July 9, 2025 / / -- Locked-In Patient Controls Eye-Tracking Software by Thought Alone with NURO's GRIDLY New neurological breakthrough enables communication without eyes, speech, or movement In a world-first, NURO has demonstrated that a completely locked-in patient suffering from a severe Anoxic Brain Injury can now control Smartbox's GRID 3 eye-tracking software purely by neurological signals — thanks to GRIDLY, NURO's revolutionary non-invasive neurotechnology. Designed to bridge the gap between brain and software, GRIDLY allows patients with no voluntary movement or gaze control to operate existing assistive technology platforms wirelessly, instantly, and without any brain surgery. In this unprecedented case, a patient previously unable to move, speak, or use an eye-gaze system reliably, took command of the GRID 3 third-party software, using only thought. 'This is one of the most powerful demonstrations of neurological access we've ever seen,' said Francois Gand, Founder and CEO of NURO. 'GRIDLY restored a path to communication for this patient who was physiologically incompatible with an eye-gaze system. GRIDLY didn't just offer an alternative — it allowed the control of the existing system and gave it back to them as an effectively working tool.' Smartbox's GRID 3 is widely known as a gold-standard software in Healthcare, a technology that reaches 175 countries and is implemented with more than 90,000 children and adults globally each year. However, patients with diffuse or total motor paralysis due to trauma or neurodegenerative diseases may be unable to use such systems. With GRIDLY, the dependency on eye movement, voice or any type of physical control is entirely removed, opening the door to a brand new mode of interaction, only powered by the human brain. This clinical milestone follows NURO's growing international momentum in non-invasive neurotechnology, with deployments now spanning over 9 countries. 'With GRIDLY, we've witnessed a locked-in patient neurologically take command wirelessly of a completely separate eye-tracking system — running on a different machine, a different operating system, and designed for gaze control — without using their eyes or body at all.' added Gand. This is also the first implementation of its kind to ever be reimbursed by Canada's WSIB, the Workers Safety Insurance Board, as the patient was originally killed by an industrial electrocution, and then clinically resuscitated at a Toronto hospital, resulting in a critical diffuse brain injury. GRIDLY is portable, wireless, implant-free, and weighs only 38 grammes or 1.34 ounces. It can operate in hospital, rehab, or home settings. It also supports currently various integrations with leading applications running on both Microsoft Windows and the Apple operating systems. About NURO NURO is a Canadian neurotechnology company pioneering non-surgical, non-invasive solutions for real-time neurological communication and cognitive analysis. Its flagship systems, including NUOS 3, GRIDLY, and MENTIS, are redefining what's possible with the human brain. Media Inquiries / Clinical Collaborations: Francois Gand, Founder & CEO [email protected] Francois Gand NURO CORP. +1 800-841-6078 email us here Legal Disclaimer: EIN Presswire provides this news content 'as is' without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the author above.
Times
08-07-2025
- Times
His voice was taken by disease. Now he delivers justice through a synthesizer
A syrupy American voice congratulates members of the jury for being selected to serve in Dundee sheriff court. The inflection is almost celebratory, as though the line-up has secured new jobs or passed an exam. Although the words were supplied by Sheriff Alastair Carmichael, who has overseen proceedings in the city for 12 years, the voice was produced by Microsoft. 'You'll already have noticed that this is another synthetic voice that's speaking my words,' Carmichael's laptop tells the courtroom. Motor neurone disease (MND), which affects the nerve cells connecting muscles and the brain, has eroded his ability to enunciate words himself. The illness began with a 'numb, spongy feeling' inside his mouth in the autumn of 2023, then progressed to a lisp. Carmichael can still talk but the range of sounds demanded by the English language are no longer feasible. The letter 'C', he tells me, is particularly difficult. When I struggle to understand, as we chat during a morning in his chambers, he jots in a notebook or taps a phrase into his phone and shows me the screen. Bizarrely, during two holidays to France, he found French easier to enunciate. Of his diagnosis, he types: 'I'm not bitter about it. It is one of life's mysteries. You can only control what you can control.' Still agile, he moves nimbly around his book-lined room, providing refreshments and showing how he uses different digital devices. Carmichael's form of MND has only affected him from the throat up, a condition known as progressive bulbar palsy. His wife Helen, sons and courtroom colleagues who converse with him daily are much quicker at understanding his words than me. In order to do his job Carmichael uses a range of text-to-speech software and each programme has its quirks. One of 127 sheriffs in Scotland, Carmichael is thought to be the only judge in the UK, and possibly the world, presiding over cases using synthesised speech. 'Carrying on doing this gives me a purpose and enables me to be a full part of society by contributing,' he says. Carmichael recorded his own voice before he lost the power of speech. He had to read 300 sentences to create the necessary voice bank with SpeakUnique. As a result, his phone and PC can read his typed words in a tone his friends recognise. A phone app speeds up the process using text templates for common scenarios, such as shopping. Crucially for his work, the system is customisable and Carmichael has spent hours inputting the kind of phrases he is most likely to need in court. The MND team within NHS Tayside helped support this with a computer system called Grid 3. Press the tab for 'traffic offence' and it reads: 'On charge one you will be disqualified from driving for X months, reduced from X months because a plea of guilty means that a trial was not required.' Carmichael only needs to fill in the appropriate numbers in the courtroom on the day. He can also type during proceedings — he finds two fingers the fastest approach — swiftly granting two warrants for arrest on the morning I visit. He deploys the same technology for taking oaths. Translators, for example, have to promise to faithfully interpret during proceedings. Once, Carmichael says, he accidentally pressed the wrong key on his device. Instead of asking the interpreter to swear solemnly and sincerely he said: 'There is no alternative to a custodial sentence.' 'You have to retain a sense of humour,' he says with a smile. Carmichael comes from a family of engineers but took a different path because his maths was 'hopeless'. Before moving north he served as a High Court prosecutor in Edinburgh for seven years. Now living nearer to his wife's extended family, who farm, he says he does not miss life in the central belt. In 2023 he sentenced Tracie Currie and Carl O'Brien for targeting Humza Yousaf, then the first minister, with racist abuse. Last November he sentenced the Earl of Dundee, Alexander Scrymgeour, for drink driving. When hearings go to trial, the systems that use his synthetic voice cannot rise to the occasion, unable to handle text longer than three sides of A4. Carmichael calls his words for a trial on to the screen. With all his directions to jurors, it runs to page 18. For this to be heard he relies on Microsoft Word, which cannot use his voice and instead provides its own. This is why his opening remarks to the jury are delivered in an American drawl. 'I cannot get rid of it,' he says. He can select the gender of the speaker and the system offers English narrators known as Hazel and George, but Carmichael says he cannot always control who shows up to the courtroom. He demonstrates a section of text delivered in a more soothing lilt, known as 'smooth' George, although Carmichael is not sure why this virtual character takes over his monologue at this point. 'Sometimes it is a complete surprise to me which voice comes to the microphone,' he says. There are pros and cons to this technological uncertainty. Carmichael emphasises the importance of the jury trusting him, but he also sees the possibility of a sudden shift in voice keeping the 15 men and women engaged. 'My laptop becomes a point of interest, who knows which voice might pop up next,' he writes. The Scottish Courts and Tribunal Service is working on a solution that will allow his own synthesised tones to be used more extensively. Carmichael has handed out hundreds of criminal sentences using voice technology and since the system was launched for jury trials last November, after a period of testing, he has adjudicated in a dozen jury trials. There have been no complaints thus far. People, he notes, are well accustomed to technology. It is the jar filled with slips of paper for picking jurors' names I find anachronistic, not his laptop on the bench. 'The important thing is [that] as long as the words are my words, an objection will not succeed,' he explains. 'For example, if I was using artificial intelligence that would be a bad thing, but I am not. I'm always making sure it is what I want to say before I say it.' The harder it has become to speak, the less self-conscious he has felt about relying on all the other options, he says, writing down 'self-conscious' because it is hard to mouth. 'I think you cannot really understand unless you have experienced something similar,' he continues. 'It is also quite humbling. I am in a new situation where I am more reliant on other people making allowances and adjusting what they do in order to accommodate me.' He says the hardest thing to deal with in court is when a witness is prevaricating or behaving offensively. 'Then you have to type things, but I cannot nuance. You have to just say, 'Answer the question'.' If someone becomes upset on the stand, he always uses his recorded voice to help them calm down, as it 'sounds more empathetic'. Carmichael does ponder how important one's voice is to personality. Aspects of communication he misses include pausing when he would like, making eye contact and gesturing as he talks, which feel absent. The emphasis of repetition in normal speech patterns is also gone. But he has learned to add extra commas to create a more natural sound and misspell some words so they are pronounced correctly. 'The systems don't like Scottish, or dialect words, and many of them get a verbal mangling unless I misspell them,' he explains. The Aberdeenshire village of Strachan is one example, which will be pronounced with a soft 'ch' in the middle unless he writes 'Stracken'. Spontaneity, Carmichael says, is what he misses the most. 'I think of something I want to say but by the time I have put it in my phone or written it down, the conversation has moved on.' Sometimes in meetings he raises his hand to indicate he has a contribution. Backed by his boss, Sheriff Principal Gillian Wade, his approach to each challenge is to simply crack on. MND, though incurable, affects patients so differently that his prognosis is unknown. He feels well. He is aiming to reduce his 'very average' golf handicap before he is 'physically unable' to play. For now, he can eat everything he wants, although it 'takes a lot of time' and a cough or sneeze 'is like a car wash'. While losing the ability to swallow is a worry, he has determined not to let fear dominate. 'I am not going to waste time and energy being miserable,' he says.
Fast Company
02-07-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
This chair costs $10,000—but it's life-changing for people who need it
Janet Feldman spent 20 years working in footwear. As VP of her family's business, she flew to Asia, supervised factory operations, and negotiated with suppliers. Then her father had a stroke, and her life took a twist. All of his life, Feldman's father had been staunchly independent. Now, he struggled to get get up from a chair without a helping hand. Feldman bought all of the lift recliners she could find on the market. These chairs were designed to help people transition between sitting and standing by tilting their entire bodies forward, but none of them fit the bill. Some were monstrously big. Others were plain ugly. Every single one of them reclined in such a way that her father slid out of it when he reclined. Then Feldman came to a resolve. 'Finally, I said, you know what? I'll make my own chair,' she recalls. Feldman saw a gap in the market for a chair that performs better than any other lift chair—and looks good while doing it. 'I wanted to have a beautiful chair that anybody would be proud to have in the living room. She left her family business, and in 2014, started her own company, called Assistance With Elegance. Ten years, eight patents, and a pandemic later, she is now launching her company's first product: the Awe chair. While other lift chairs push up from the floor, the Awe chair never leaves the ground. The only thing that lifts is the seat itself, which makes for a much more elegant experience. To prevent anyone from sliding out, the chair comes with an ingenious footrest that glides out as the chair reclines and scoops up your feet into place. It took 10 years to make, and two years to figure out the footrest alone. Its cost is $10,000. A chair for the 'silver tsunami' When Feldman became her father's caregiver, she noticed that people, including doctors, started to look at her instead of him. 'Old people, they're invisible,' she told me. 'Nobody wants to look at old people because nobody wants to be old, and it's sad to look at what we're all going to be.' It's high time we started looking, because 73 million Americans, or one-quarter of the U.S. population today, is between 60 and 78 years old. By 2035, the Census Bureau estimates that older adults will outnumber American minors. The so-called 'silver tsunami' is projected to fuel an economic boom: By 2050, people over 50 are projected to generate more than $28 trillion globally. And yet, the elderly are still largely left out of design meetings. They're seldom the target audience for new product launches. Over the past few years, the tide has been turning, albeit slowly. Independent designers like Sarah Hossli and Lanzavecchia + Wai have each designed their own version of a chair that helps the elderly get up with dignity and grace. More broadly, Remsen makes pill containers that look like jewelry boxes. Boom Home Medical makes pastel-colored bedside urinals that look like flower vases. Can Go specializes in high-tech smart canes with GPS and activity tracking, an integrated flashlight, and cellular data for emergency phone calls. The Awe chair sits within this ecosystem, and Feldman hopes to keep expanding the offerings. 'We do realize that not everybody's going to like a club chair. Some people might want much more modern designs,' she says. 'It was so hard to do just this, that we figured we'd start really small and focused.' From the dreamworld to reality The look and feel of the Awe chair quite literally came to Feldman in a dream: 'I wanted an old-style club chair that your grandfather would sit in,' she remembers. Brown, crinkly, straight from 1929, but with a modern take—and, of course, the technology to go with it. The chair comes in two sizes and seven colors, including midnight blue, crimson red, and emerald green. For now, it is available directly to customers via the company's website; the team is also hoping to partner with high-end assisted living facilities, airport lounges, and even golf clubs. Feldman isn't a designer, so she surrounded herself well. The chair was designed in collaboration with Jessica Banks, a robotics expert who runs a studio in Brooklyn, New York, that focuses on robotics and furniture design. It was engineered in Germany, with motors from China, and handcrafted in North Carolina, with leathers from Italy. Feldman declined to share how much it cost her to bring it to market, in part 'because it's still so shocking to me,' she says, noting she is now selling her house in West Hampton to replenish the coffers. Earlier this month, I went out to the company's offices in SoHo to try it out. As the seat gently lifted me, I thought of my grandfather, whose weakened arms could no longer push him up from his old armchair. As the chair gently lowered me back down, I thought of the thud he would make when he sat back down, letting gravity do the work his knees no longer could. Of the four people who were at the office that day, three of them had experienced a similar moment with their parents or grandparents. 'It's such a common experience,' Feldman said. Every other touchpoint was carefully thought through. The edges of the front of the armrests are slightly recessed, which provides an extra handgrip when getting up. A cupholder is built straight into the armrest. A side pocket lets you store glasses or a book. Of the chairs Feldman's father tried, all had pockets that were too far down to reach. 'We just raised the pocket,' she says. 'All you have to do is look at how people use things.' One of Feldman's biggest pet peeves with other chairs was the lack of a footrest to stop people from sliding out—but adding one turned out to be more challenging than expected. Her team cycled through factories in Michigan and Florida that make airline chairs or theater chairs, but they couldn't build the right mechanism. The German factory she ended up partnering with went bankrupt twice before resuming business. Finally, they found a way to coordinate the reclining flap and the footrest so that the footrest slides out until the two meet to form a 'T.' A safety curtain at the bottom prevents small pets or children from crawling under. These features are almost enough to make you forget about the sticker shock. At $10,000, the Awe chair is almost 10 times more expensive than the average lift recliner in the U.S., which is between $700 and $1,500. Feldman is sensitive to the price tag and hopes to follow through with a more affordable line that's 'maybe not made in Germany, maybe not using Italian leathers.' She also knows that her target audience—retired boomers—has a lot more disposable income than the average working American. 'I know it's a very high price. But for now, we feel like it's such a beautiful, special chair.'
Yahoo
25-06-2025
- Yahoo
'Very emotional': Brain-computer tech gives kids with disabilities new powers
It sounds like something from a futuristic film: Technology that allows users to control their environment with mere thoughts. But for kids with disabilities in Ontario, it's an emerging reality that's helping them connect with the world around them in unprecedented ways.
CBC
24-06-2025
- Health
- CBC
'Very emotional': Brain-scanning tech gives kids with disabilities new powers
It sounds like something from a futuristic film: Technology that allows users to control their environment with mere thoughts. But for kids with disabilities in Ontario, it's an emerging reality that's helping them connect with the world around them in unprecedented ways. For 10-year-old Irelynn, who's non-verbal and has limited mobility, it means she can make a toy play music just by thinking about clapping. "Probably the best thing I've ever seen," says her dad, Jeff. Out of respect for the family's safety concerns, CBC is withholding Irelynn and her father's last name from this story. The technology, known as brain computer interface (BCI), relies on a black headset equipped with several circular sensors that listen to electrical signals inside Irelynn's head. "She has taught software to recognize a particular command thought," says Susannah Van Damme, an occupational therapist and the team lead of the clinical BCI program at Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital in Toronto. "So for Irelynn, she loves applause, she loves clapping, so that was the first command thought that we worked with." Van Damme led the recent session with Irelynn at the John McGivney Children's Centre in Windsor, Ont. The centre, which provides services and care to local kids with disabilities, is among the first in the province to train with the tool. A $30 million donation from the Slaight Family Foundation late last year is helping spread the technology beyond Holland Bloorview, which pioneered it. Jodi Fischer, manager for occupational therapy and physiotherapy at McGivney, says the training is in the early stages, but that it's been "very exciting" so far. "They see a way that they get to control their environment […] in a way that they've never been able to do in lots of instances," she says. "It's giving them a tool that they didn't know was possible." She said one boy she's worked with for years used the technology to make a machine throw a ball — something that could be integrated into a group program, or even allow him to play with his family in the future. "It is very emotional, and we've seen that time and time again in different demos," she said. The technology, built on decades of research at Holland Bloorview, is far from perfect. It takes a while for staff in the McGivney gymnasium to secure the headset and its multiple sensors in just the right spots on Irelynn. But Irelynn, wearing pigtails and a red summer dress, sits calmly in her wheelchair. She's done this before. "In order for us to get those signals, we need to make sure every electrode is making good contact with her skull," Van Damme said. "So we have to move hair around. We have little felts that are soaked in saline solution so that salt helps with conductivity," she said. "And once we know that the headset is well connected, then we're able to move forward and train the system to recognize when she wants to activate a toy." The current headsets were designed for adults, Van Damme says, so she hopes they can keep improving the technology. But for Jeff, Irelynn's father, the device has already opened up their worlds. She was diagnosed with STXBP1 disorder, a rare genetic condition, when she was a toddler, he says. "It just shows that children are capable of so much more than what we really know," he said. Both Jeff and Fischer, the therapy manager at McGivney, said the tool gives them hope for what technology could do for people with disabilities in the future. "Who knows where it will go?" she said.
