Today I read a paper titled “Brain-Computer Interface Controlled Robotic Gait Orthosis”
The abstract is:
Reliance on wheelchairs after spinal cord injury (SCI) leads to many medical co-morbidities
Treatment of these conditions contributes to the majority of SCI health care costs
Restoring able-body-like ambulation after SCI may reduce the incidence of these conditions, and increase independence and quality of life
However, no biomedical solution exists that can reverse this lost neurological function, and hence novel methods are needed
Brain-computer interface (BCI) controlled lower extremity prosthesis may constitute one such novel approach
One subject with able-body and one with paraplegia due to SCI underwent electroencephalogram (EEG) recording while engaged in alternating epochs of idling and walking kinesthetic motor imagery (KMI)
These data were analyzed to generate an EEG prediction model for online BCI operation
A commercial robotic gait orthosis (RoGO) system (treadmill suspended), was interfaced with the BCI computer
In an online test, the subjects were tasked to ambulate using the BCI-RoGO system when prompted by computerized cues
The performance of this system was assessed with cross-correlation analysis, and omission and false alarm rates
The offline accuracy of the EEG prediction model averaged 86.3%
The cross-correlation between instructional cues and BCI-RoGO walking epochs averaged 0.812 +/- 0.048 (p-value<10^-4)
There were on average 0.8 false alarms per session and no omissions
This is the first time a person with parapegia due to SCI regained basic brain-controlled ambulation, thereby indicating that restoring brain-controlled ambulation is feasible
Future work will test this system in a population of individuals with SCI
If successful, this may justify future development of invasive BCI-controlled lower extremity prostheses
This system may also be applied to incomplete SCI to improve neurological outcomes beyond those of standard physiotherapy