Deans' stroke musings: Neural Decoding of Robot-Assisted Gait during Rehabilitation after Stroke

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Sunday, March 4, 2018

Neural Decoding of Robot-Assisted Gait during Rehabilitation after Stroke

If we don't even know what the neural correlates of walking in the real world are how the hell can we expect robotics to recover us to that state?

Th latest here:

Neural Decoding of Robot-Assisted Gait during Rehabilitation after Stroke

Contreras-Vidal, Jose L.^1,5; Bortole, Magdo^1,2; Zhu, Fangshi¹; Nathan, Kevin¹; Venkatakrishnan, Anusha^1,4; Francisco, Gerard E.^3,5; Soto, Rogelio⁵; Pons, Jose L.^2,5

American Journal of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation: February 23, 2018 - Volume Publish Ahead of Print - Issue - p

doi: 10.1097/PHM.0000000000000914

Research Article: PDF Only

Objective Advancements in robot-assisted gait rehabilitation and brain-machine interfaces (BMI) may enhance stroke physiotherapy by engaging patients while providing information about robot-induced cortical adaptations. We investigate the feasibility of decoding walking from brain activity in stroke survivors during therapy using a powered exoskeleton integrated with an electroencephalography (EEG)-based BMI.
Design The H2 powered exoskeleton was designed for overground gait training with actuated hip, knee and ankle joints. It was integrated with active-electrode EEG and evaluated in hemiparetic stroke survivors over 12 sessions/4 weeks. A continuous-time Kalman decoder operating on delta-band EEG was designed to estimate gait kinematics.
Results Five chronic stroke patients completed the study with improvements in walking distance and speed training over 4 weeks, correlating with increased offline decoding accuracy. Accuracies of predicted joint angles improved with session and gait speed, suggesting an improved neural representation for gait, and the feasibility to design an EEG-based BMI to monitor brain activity or control a rehabilitative exoskeleton.
Conclusion The Kalman decoder showed increased accuracies as the longitudinal training intervention progressed in the stroke participants. These results demonstrate the feasibility of studying changes in patterns of neuroelectric cortical activity during post-stroke rehabilitation and represent the first step in developing a BMI for controlling powered exoskeletons.