DEMO
Natasha Bhatia, Fernando Kenji Sakabe, Katherine J. Mimnaugh, Lucivanio Varela da Silva, Denis Delisle-Rodriguez, Nancy M Amato
Rehabilitation for paralysis due to Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) can take many forms, but one method which has shown promise involves the use of a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI). With a BCI, specific patterns of brain activity generated by a user can be detected non-invasively through electrodes placed on the scalp and decoded to provide communication with a computer or device. At the Santos Dumont Institute in Brazil, treatment for individuals with SCI involves having a person imagine moving one of their limbs (called Motor Imagery or MI), and through a BCI, converting the MI into functional electrical stimulation to the paralyzed limb that was imagined being moved. This method to bypass the injury and re-link conscious thought to bodily sensation has shown some efficacy for visitors to their clinic. However, it can happen that this treatment occurs a significant amount of time after the injury, which can make imagining motion in a limb experiencing paralysis sometimes for years difficult for the individual being treated. To address this challenge, and in collaboration with clinicians at the Institute, we created a visualization in Virtual Reality (VR) which shows a first-person perspective of the limb movements which must be imagined for SCI rehabilitation. We aim to test the efficacy of this visualization in improving MI generation later this year.