학술논문

Neuromorphic Decoding of Spinal Motor Neuron Behaviour During Natural Hand Movements for a New Generation of Wearable Neural Interfaces
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering IEEE Trans. Neural Syst. Rehabil. Eng. Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering, IEEE Transactions on. 31:3035-3046 2023
Subject
Bioengineering
Computing and Processing
Robotics and Control Systems
Signal Processing and Analysis
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Neurons
Muscles
Thumb
Recording
Wrist
Electrodes
Firing
Neural interfaces
neuromorphic
spiking neural networks
spinal motor neurons
wearable
Language
ISSN
1534-4320
1558-0210
Abstract
We propose a neuromorphic framework to process the activity of human spinal motor neurons for movement intention recognition. This framework is integrated into a non-invasive interface that decodes the activity of motor neurons innervating intrinsic and extrinsic hand muscles. One of the main limitations of current neural interfaces is that machine learning models cannot exploit the efficiency of the spike encoding operated by the nervous system. Spiking-based pattern recognition would detect the spatio-temporal sparse activity of a neuronal pool and lead to adaptive and compact implementations, eventually running locally in embedded systems. Emergent Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) have not yet been used for processing the activity of in-vivo human neurons. Here we developed a convolutional SNN to process a total of 467 spinal motor neurons whose activity was identified in 5 participants while executing 10 hand movements. The classification accuracy approached ${0}.{95} \pm {0}.{14}$ for both isometric and non-isometric contractions. These results show for the first time the potential of highly accurate motion intent detection by combining non-invasive neural interfaces and SNN.