Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering Commons^™

Development Of An Eeg Brain-Machine Interface To Aid In Recovery Of Motor Function After Neurological Injury, Elizabeth Salmon

Theses and Dissertations--Biomedical Engineering

Impaired motor function following neurological injury may be overcome through therapies that induce neuroplastic changes in the brain. Therapeutic methods include repetitive exercises that promote use-dependent plasticity (UDP), the benefit of which may be increased by first administering peripheral nerve stimulation (PNS) to activate afferent fibers, resulting in increased cortical excitability. We speculate that PNS delivered only in response to attempted movement would induce timing-dependent plasticity (TDP), a mechanism essential to normal motor learning. Here we develop a brain-machine interface (BMI) to detect movement intent and effort in healthy volunteers (n=5) from their electroencephalogram (EEG). This could be used in …