How a dancer with ALS used brainwaves to perform live

ELI5 / TLDR

A professional dancer named Breanna Olson has ALS — a disease that gradually takes away all voluntary movement while leaving the mind completely intact. Engineers at Dentsu Lab built a system that picks up the faint electrical signals her muscles and brain still produce, then maps those signals onto a digital avatar that moves the way she intends to. In December 2025, that avatar danced live on stage in Amsterdam. She called it “exhilarating” and “magical.”

The Full Story

The assumption baked into every product

Most technology assumes the user can move their hands. Swipe, tap, type, click — the entire paradigm of human-computer interaction sits on that foundation. For roughly 200 million people worldwide with serious physical disabilities, the assumption doesn’t hold.

ALS is a particularly cruel version of this problem. The motor neurons responsible for voluntary movement degrade over time. The body goes still. The mind does not. The disease doesn’t take cognition — it takes expression.

Treating it as an interface problem

The engineers at Dentsu Lab reframed this. If the output channel — the body — is compromised, find a new one. Their system, called Project Humanity, starts with electromyography (EMG) sensors placed directly on the patient’s body. Think of EMG like a very sensitive microphone for muscles: even when a muscle can barely twitch, it still produces tiny electrical signals. The sensors pick those up.

That raw biological data gets processed and mapped onto a digital avatar — a full-body representation in virtual space. The avatar moves because the person’s muscles are still trying to move. The system just makes the intention visible.

Not just an accessibility tool

The clever part: the avatar isn’t a one-trick display piece. It functions as a general-purpose control surface. Once mapped, the user can interact with any software — productivity tools, communication platforms, creative applications, games. They’re not locked into a bespoke assistive gadget. They have a body in digital space that works anywhere.

Dentsu Lab already tested this in e-sports, running events where participants with physical disabilities played alongside those without. At the layer of the interface, the differences in physical ability became irrelevant. The implications stretch beyond gaming — education, remote work, social spaces in the metaverse — all currently inaccessible to people without a viable way in.

The Amsterdam performance

On the evening of December 10th, 2025, Dentsu Lab and NTT Inc. staged “Waves of Will” in Amsterdam. This was the expressive leap beyond the earlier e-sports proof of function.

Breanna Olson, a professional dancer living with ALS, performed live. The technical mechanism shifted from EMG to brainwave detection — capturing the electrical activity corresponding to her intention to dance and translating it in real time into choreography performed by her digital avatar on stage.

Breanna described the experience as “exhilarating” and “magical” — watching herself, in virtual form, take to the stage once more.

Claude’s Take

This is a solid piece of tech journalism that frames an interface problem clearly and then shows the solution working under real conditions. The article earns points for treating the technology as an engineering story rather than an inspirational montage — the progression from EMG sensors to brainwave detection to live stage performance is laid out with enough specificity to understand what’s actually happening.

What it lacks: technical depth. How exactly do brainwave signals get mapped to choreography? How much latency is involved? What’s the fidelity of the avatar’s movement compared to what a healthy dancer could produce? The article gestures at these questions but never answers them. The BBC interview quote from Breanna is the only direct sourcing, and it’s doing a lot of emotional heavy lifting with very few words.

The underlying technology — using residual biological signals to drive a general-purpose digital avatar — is genuinely interesting and has real implications beyond the performing arts. The e-sports application is arguably the more consequential proof point, even though the dance performance is the better story.

Score: 7/10. Well-framed, concrete enough to understand, thin on the technical specifics that would make it exceptional.