Cognitive control signals for neural prosthetics
First Claim
1. A method, comprising:
- implanting at least one electrode in a brain of a subject;
receiving electrical signals generated by a plurality of neurons at the at least one implanted electrode, the electrical signals comprising a portion that encodes at least one abstract cognitive concept, the portion of the electrical signals encoding the at least one abstract cognitive concept not encoding either motor movements or intended motor movements, the plurality of neurons having generated the portion of the electrical signals encoding the at least one abstract cognitive concept without having been trained to do so;
at least partially decoding the at least one abstract cognitive concept encoded in the portion of the electrical signals by generating a feature set based on the electrical signals and mapping the feature set to the at least one abstract cognitive concept using a transformation rule; and
generating a control signal to instruct an external device to perform a task associated with the at least partially decoded at least one abstract cognitive concept.
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Accused Products
Abstract
In an embodiment, the invention relates to neural prosthetic devices in which control signals are based on the cognitive activity of the prosthetic user. The control signals may be used to control an array of external devices, such as prosthetics, computer systems, and speech synthesizers. Data obtained from monkeys'"'"' movement intentions were recorded, decoded with a computer algorithm, and used to position cursors on a computer screen. Not only the intended goals, but also the value of the reward the animals expected to receive at the end of each trial, were decoded from the recordings. The results indicate that brain activity related to cognitive variables can be a viable source of signals for the control of a cognitive-based neural prosthetic.
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Citations
34 Claims
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1. A method, comprising:
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implanting at least one electrode in a brain of a subject; receiving electrical signals generated by a plurality of neurons at the at least one implanted electrode, the electrical signals comprising a portion that encodes at least one abstract cognitive concept, the portion of the electrical signals encoding the at least one abstract cognitive concept not encoding either motor movements or intended motor movements, the plurality of neurons having generated the portion of the electrical signals encoding the at least one abstract cognitive concept without having been trained to do so; at least partially decoding the at least one abstract cognitive concept encoded in the portion of the electrical signals by generating a feature set based on the electrical signals and mapping the feature set to the at least one abstract cognitive concept using a transformation rule; and generating a control signal to instruct an external device to perform a task associated with the at least partially decoded at least one abstract cognitive concept. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18)
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19. A non-transitory machine-readable medium storing machine-executable instructions that when executed by a machine cause the machine to:
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detect neural activity within electrical signals generated by a plurality of neurons that encodes at least one abstract cognitive concept, the detected neural activity being distinguishable from neural activity that encodes information related to both motor movements and intended motor movements, the electrical signals having been received from at least one electrode implanted in at least one area of a brain of a subject, the subject being untrained with respect to generating the detected neural activity; generate a feature set for the detected neural activity; map the feature set to the at least one abstract cognitive concept using a transformation rule; and generate a control signal to instruct an external device to perform a task associated with the at least one abstract cognitive concept encoded by the detected neural activity. - View Dependent Claims (20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30)
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31. An apparatus, comprising:
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a measuring device implantable in a subject; a database of neural activity data observed in the subject; an input device operative to receive electrical signals from the measuring device after the measuring device is implanted in the subject, the electrical signals comprising neural activity generated by a plurality of neurons and encoding at least one abstract cognitive concept, the neural activity encoding the at least one abstract cognitive concept being different from neural activity encoding information related to both motor movements and intended motor movements, the plurality of neurons having not been trained to generate the neural activity encoding the at least one abstract cognitive concept; a signal processor connected to the input device, and operative to analyze the neural activity encoding the at least one abstract cognitive concept to generate a feature set; and a decoder operative to apply a transformation rule to the feature set that maps the feature set to the at least one abstract cognitive concept encoded by the neural activity, and generate a control signal based on an analytical operation performed with the database of neural activity data from the subject. - View Dependent Claims (32, 33, 34)
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Specification