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Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, have built a soft, adhesive patch capable of turning throat movements into speech.

The patch, written about in a paper published in Nature Communications on Tuesday, is made out of a material that converts motion into electricity. This material, developed by the UCLA team in 2021, could be a game-changer for sensors and wearables limited by their power sources. 

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The device sticks to the throat, converting the person’s throat muscle maneuvers into electrical signals. Those signals power the device, and are also fed into a machine-learning algorithm that is trained to match the throat movements to specific words. The device then projects those words through its speaker.

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