Language serves as the conduit for human thought and the chief means of communication, playing an indispensable role in our daily existence. Nevertheless, severe brain conditions like stroke, brain tumors, injuries to the brain and spinal cord, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) can impair language function. Data indicates that roughly 8 million patients in China have suffered a loss of language capabilities as a result of these ailments. Globally, brain-computer interface technology has already succeeded in synthesizing Western languages, including English and Spanish, offering a glimmer of hope to those with language impairments.

However, Chinese, as the world's most spoken language, exhibits distinct traits in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. These unique aspects present substantial hurdles in exploring the neural encoding and decoding mechanisms of Chinese. Recently, a collaborative effort between the Shanghai Institute of Microsystems and Information Technology, Huashan Hospital (Affiliated with Fudan University), and Brainbot Technology (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. has led to a groundbreaking achievement: for the first time on an international scale, they've accomplished real-time Chinese language decoding and sentence synthesis via a brain-computer interface.

The team developed a 256-channel high-throughput flexible brain-computer interface, along with a real-time neural network decoding algorithm. Following nine days of training, the participant achieved a 71.2% accuracy rate in decoding 394 Chinese syllables. The decoding delay for a single syllable was a mere 65 milliseconds, and the real-time Chinese sentence decoding rate reached 49.6 characters per minute. This milestone not only introduces a novel communication avenue for patients with Chinese language impairments but also underscores the immense potential of brain-computer interface technology in civilian uses.