title: A Closed-loop Brain Computer Interface to a Virtual Reality Avatar: Gait Adaptation to Visual Kinematic Perturbations.
abstract: The control of human bipedal locomotion is of great interest to the field of lower-body brain computer interfaces (BCIs) for rehabilitation of gait. While the feasibility of a closed-loop BCI system for the control of a lower body exoskeleton has been recently shown, multi-day closed-loop neural decoding of human gait in a virtual reality (BCI-VR) environment has yet to be demonstrated. In this study, we propose a real-time closed-loop BCI that decodes lower limb joint angles from scalp electroencephalography (EEG) during treadmill walking to control the walking movements of a virtual avatar. Moreover, virtual kinematic perturbations resulting in asymmetric walking gait patterns of the avatar were also introduced to investigate gait adaptation using the closed-loop BCI-VR system over a period of eight days. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of using a closed-loop BCI to learn to control a walking avatar under normal and altered visuomotor perturbations, which involved cortical adaptations. These findings have implications for the development of BCI-VR systems for gait rehabilitation after stroke and for understanding cortical plasticity induced by a closed-loop BCI system.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77004, USA.
authors.forename: Trieu Phat
authors.initials: TP
authors.lastname: Luu
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77004, USA.
authors.forename: Yongtian
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: He
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77004, USA.
authors.forename: Samuel
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Brown
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77004, USA.
authors.forename: Sho
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Nakagome
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77004, USA.
authors.forename: Jose L
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Contreras-Vidal
keywords: Brain machine interface; gait adaptation; virtual environment; visuomotor adaptation