Upper-limb muscular electrical stimulation driven by EEG-based detections of the intentions to move: a proposed intervention for patients with stroke

Abstract

This study proposes an intervention for stroke patients in which electrical stimulation of muscles in the affected arm is supplied when movement intention is detected from the electroencephalographic signal. The detection relies on the combined analysis of two movement related cortical patterns: the event-related desynchronization and the bereitschaftspotential. Results with two healthy subjects and three chronic stroke patients show that reliable EEG-based estimations of the movement onsets can be generated (on average, 66.9 % (std: 26.4) of the movements are detected with 0.42 (std: 0.17) false activations per minute) which in turn give rise to electrical stimuli providing sensory feedback tightly associated to the movement planning (average detection latency of the onsets of the movements was 54.4 (std: 287.9 ms)).