A flexible patch could help people with voice disorders talk

The human voice, with all its power to mesmerise audiences, woo loved ones and irritate neighbours, is a delicate thing. When a person loses their voice today, the easiest fix is to resort to typing, texting, or writing notes to communicate. They have designed and tested a soft patch that can be stuck onto a person’s neck, where it will pick up muscle movements and, with the help of machine-learning algorithms that process the signals, translate them into audible speech. Typing can be slow and inconvenient, says Jun Chen, the paper’s lead author, and writing legible notes is only possible in good lighting. When embedded in a patch with a hem of copper coils generating a background magnetic field, the movements of the particles can be accurately captured as variations against this background.