A novel brain-computer interface for chronic stroke patients

Abstract

We present a novel brain-computer interface for neuromodulation that leads to long lasting cortical plasticity. The system entails in recording the movement-related cortical potential (MRCP) as a subject imagines a dorsiflexion task and triggering an electrical stimulator to generate a single stimulus to the target nerve. This system has been tested on healthy subjects to demonstrate that an artificially generated signal (the peripheral afferent volley) can interact with a physiologically generated signal (the MRCP) in humans, leading to plastic changes. Further, in a group of 13 chronic stroke patients, the intervention also induced functional improvements within only three sessions. In this chapter, we outline the protocol in detail and discuss the potential for artificially inducing cortical plasticity in patients (neuromodulation). In these applications, the intention to move can be detected without a cue directly from the EEG traces. We have commenced to identify force and speed characteristics from single MRCPs, and our pilot data reveals that, if the nerve stimulation characteristics match the imagined movement, plasticity is further enhanced.