This throat patch speaks for patients with voice disorders
The innovations for patients who can’t speak just keep getting cooler.
We recently brought you a story about glasses that can detect and interpret “silent speech.” This week, the device we’re featuring is a throat patch that can speak for you.
The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) research team behind the flexible, adhesive wearable device published their latest research in Nature Communications last month.
Let’s dive into how it works and why it excites us!
Speak, throat patch!
Picture a small grey patch right at the base of your throat. It’s lightweight, ringing in at approximately 7.2 grams, and holds stable despite your perspiration.
When applied to the throat, the device turns that organ’s subtle movements into speech by converting motion into electricity. The signals generated from the throat movements feed into a machine-learning algorithm trained to match these signals to specific words.
The result comes out of the throat patch’s own speaker.
“Even if you have dysfunctional vocal folds, those sensors are very sensitive and able to convert the muscle vibration into electricity,” said Jun Chen, lead researcher and biomedical engineer at UCLA. “We could help people speak without vocal folds.”
In the future, patients with various degrees of voice disorders may be able to use the patch to communicate freely—without further straining themselves.
The throat patch isn’t at a clinical testing stage yet, with the eight participants in proof-of-concept testing so far not having voice disorders. In these early tests, accuracy has stayed at around 95% for the words and phrases the device is trained on thus far.
Another limitation is that the device requires feedback from laryngeal muscle movements to work, while some voice disorders result from the removal of those muscles—such as in throat cancer surgery.
Our perspective: Wearables that prioritize independence
One of the coolest aspects of this new device is that the material is self-powered through how it generates electricity.
Before this application for voice disorders, the UCLA team developed the stretchable, waterproof material back in 2021. They uncovered that the magnetoelastic effect—the change in magnetization when tiny magnets are constantly pushed together and pulled apart—can still exist in a soft system like a flexible patch.
Now, their approach may help more sensors and wearables ditch the cords and break free of their limiting power sources.
One of the Chen lab’s earlier innovations was a very buzzy American Sign Language interpretation glove, which was publicized in 2020 but hasn’t reached the commercialization stage yet due to COVID-related delays.
Whether it’s an ASL glove, a talking throat patch, or another form of wearable, not needing to rely on a power source can help users take back their independence.
Of course, one might point out that whiteboards and text-to-speech devices already serve voice disorder patients well—and are cheap and largely power-independent. But the possible jump in fluid communication with a device like this one is huge.
If the device can function for more of the English language and be accessed at an affordable price, it could make many patients’ and providers’ lives just a bit easier. That’s one of our favorite innovation endpoints, after all.