Reconstructing hand kinematics during reach to grasp movements from electroencephalographic signals

With continued research on brain machine interfaces (BMIs), it is now possible to control prosthetic arm position in space to a high degree of accuracy. However, a reliable decoder to infer the dexterous movements of fingers from brain activity during a natural grasping motion is still to be demonstrated. Here, we present a methodology to accurately predict and reconstruct natural hand kinematics from non-invasively recorded scalp electroencephalographic (EEG) signals during object grasping movements. The high performance of our decoder is attributed to a combination of the correct input space (time-domain amplitude modulation of delta-band smoothed EEG signals) and an optimal subset of EEG electrodes selected using a genetic algorithm. Trajectories of the joint angles were reconstructed for metacarpo-phalangeal (MCP) joints of the fingers as well as the carpo-metacarpal (CMC) and MCP joints of the thumb. High decoding accuracy (Pearson's correlation coefficient, r) between the predicted and observed trajectories (r = 0.76 ± 0.01; averaged across joints) indicate that this technique may be suitable for use with a closed-loop real-time BMI to control grasping motion in prosthetics with high degrees of freedom. This demonstrates the first successful decoding of hand pre-shaping kinematics from noninvasive neural signals.