Dr. Junichi Yamagishi, an EMC Principal Investigator from the Centre for Speech Technology Research, has been awarded a seedcorn grant of £5000. These innovative 'priming' grants are supported by a generous donation from the RS MacDonald Trust and MND Scotland, and enable the Investigator to obtain preliminary results for subsequent larger-scale grant applications.

This funding will support a visiting PhD student to assess a new form of technology that could benefit MND patients in the later stages of the disease whose speech has become disordered and inaudible. Currently, eye-tracking is used as the major input to computer-assisted communication devices; however, this is very expensive and therefore not always available. Dr. Yamagishi and his team will investigate an alternative approach using a "NAM microphone", which can accurately record non-audible vocalizations. It is hoped that these sounds could input into a communication device, and perhaps ultimately be directly synthesised using text-to-speech synthesis, significantly improving the quality of life of MND patients.