Bypassing the Natural Visual-Motor Pathway to Execute Complex Movement Related Tasks Using Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Sets.
In visual-motor coordination, the human brain processes visual stimuli representative of complex motion-related tasks at the occipital lobe to generate the necessary neuronal signals for the parietal and pre-frontal lobes, which in turn generates movement related plans to excite the motor cortex to execute the actual tasks. The paper introduces a novel approach to provide rehabilitative support to patients suffering from neurological damage in their pre-frontal, parietal and/or motor cortex regions. An attempt to bypass the natural visual-motor pathway is undertaken using interval type-2 fuzzy sets to generate the approximate EEG response of the damaged pre-frontal/parietal/motor cortex from the occipital EEG signals. The approximate EEG response is used to trigger a pre-trained joint coordinate generator to obtain the desired joint coordinates of the link end-points of a robot imitating the human subject. The robot arm is here employed as a rehabilitative aid in order to move each link end-points to the desired locations in the reference coordinate system by appropriately activating its links using the well-known inverse kinematics approach. The mean-square positional errors obtained for each link end-points is found within acceptable limits for all experimental subjects including subjects with partial parietal damage, indicating a possible impact of the proposed approach in rehabilitative robotics. Subjective variation in EEG features over different sessions of experimental trials is modeled here using interval type-2 fuzzy sets for its inherent power to handle uncertainty. Experiments undertaken confirm that interval type-2 fuzzy realization outperforms its classical type-1 counterpart and back-propagation neural approaches in all experimental cases, considering link positional error as a metric. The proposed research offers a new opening for the development of possible rehabilitative aids for people with partial impairment in visual-motor coordination.
Anwesha
A
Khasnobish
Amit
A
Konar
D N
DN
Tibarewala
Atulya K
AK
Nagar
D000328:Adult; D062207:Brain-Computer Interfaces; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000503:physiopathology*; D004569:Electroencephalography / Q000379:methods*; D017143:Fuzzy Logic; D006801:Humans; D008328:Man-Machine Systems; D008875:Middle Aged; D009068:Movement; D009069:Movement Disorders / Q000503:physiopathology* / Q000534:rehabilitation; D009434:Neural Pathways; D000066530:Neurological Rehabilitation / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated / Q000379:methods; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012371:Robotics / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity