Wearable brain-machine interface turns intentions into actions

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发布时间：2022.04.19 18:42 访问次数：作者：

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A new wearable brain-machine interface (BMI) system could improve the quality of life for people with motor dysfunction or paralysis, even those struggling with locked-in syndrome -- when a person is fully conscious but unable to move or communicate.

A multi-institutional, international team of researchers led by the lab of Woon-Hong Yeo at the Georgia Institute of Technology combined wireless soft scalp electronics and virtual reality in a BMI system that allows the user to imagine an action and wirelessly control a wheelchair or robotic arm.

The team, which included researchers from the University of Kent (United Kingdom) and Yonsei University (Republic of Korea), describes the new motor imagery-based BMI system this month in the journal Advanced Science.

"The major advantage of this system to the user, compared to what currently exists, is that it is soft and comfortable to wear, and doesn't have any wires," said Yeo, associate professor on the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.

BMI systems are a rehabilitation technology that analyzes a person's brain signals and translates that neural activity into commands, turning intentions into actions. The most common non-invasive method for acquiring those signals is ElectroEncephaloGraphy, EEG, which typically requires a cumbersome electrode skull cap and a tangled web of wires.

These devices generally rely heavily on gels and pastes to help maintain skin contact, require extensive set-up times, are generally inconvenient and uncomfortable to use. The devices also often suffer from poor signal acquisition due to material degradation or motion artifacts -- the ancillary "noise" which may be caused by something like teeth grinding or eye blinking. This noise shows up in brain-data and must be filtered out.

原文链接：https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/07/210721120657.htm