Focusing on sound production instead of word choice makes for a flexible system. The participant's implant gets hooked up for testing. Credit: UC Regents Stephen Hawking, a British physicist and arguably the most famous man suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), communicated with the world using a sensor installed in his glasses. That sensor used tiny movements of a single muscle in his cheek to select characters on a screen. Once he typed a full sentence at a rate of roughly one wo...