Regaining the lost functionality of limbs is the top priority for people with motor skills impairment as it directly affects their ability to execute activities of daily living and hence, worsens their quality of life. In the last two decades, a great deal of research has focused on error-related potential (ErrP) based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Many applications have been developed to assist motor-impaired people in their rehabilitation and among these are robots, spellers, gesture recognition systems, and braincontrolled wheelchairs. In this paper, we present a review of various ErrP based BCI that can potentially aid motor-disabled people in their rehabilitation and execution of their daily activities. First, we describe the ErrP phenomenon and its characteristics followed by a comprehensive application-driven discussion on ErrP based rehabilitation and assistive strategies for motor-impaired people, including studies conducted since the inception of ErrP to the current state-of-the-art applications. Lastly, we discuss the potential issues and challenges being faced by current state-of-the-art applications as well as important future pathways and research directions that might be adopted for advanced ErrP-BCIs used in clinical settings.
Public safety emergency rescue can now detect the characteristic signals of a living body (e.g. movement, breathing, heartbeat, etc.). This area of research uses life-detecting radars to identify the bodys type, quantity, direction, distance, gestures, and physiological characteristics. Life-detecting radars (LDRs) emit electromagnetic waves that can pass through walls or other covered media and probe for human life. This technology can be widely applied for search and rescue attempts in fires, landslides, mudslides, earthquakes, and other disasters. It can also be used to monitor personnels location in terrorism or hostage rescue activities, search for wounded soldiers on the battlefield, and lock enemy snipers in urban warfare and other environments.
Conventional rehabilitation systems typically execute a fixed set of programs that most motor-impaired stroke patients undergo. In these systems, the brain, which is embodied in the body, is often left out. Including the brains of stroke patients in the control loop of a rehabilitation system can be worthwhile as the system can be tailored to each participant and, thus, be more effective. Here, we propose a novel brain-computer interface (BCI)-based robot-assisted stroke rehabilitation system (RASRS), which takes inputs from the patient's intrinsic feedback mechanism to adapt the assistance level of the RASRS. The proposed system will utilize the patients' consciousness about their performance decoded through their error-related negativity signals. As a proof-of-concept, we experimented on 12 healthy people in which we recorded their electroencephalogram (EEG) signals while performing a standard rehabilitation exercise. We set the performance requirements beforehand and observed participants' neural responses when they failed/met the set requirements and found a statistically significant (p < 0.05) difference in their neural responses in the two conditions. The feasibility of the proposed BCI-based RASRS was demonstrated through a use-case description with a timing diagram and meeting the crucial requirements for developing the proposed rehabilitation system. The use of a patient's intrinsic feedback mechanism will have significant implications for the development of human-in-the-loop stroke rehabilitation systems.
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