ABSTRACT
Understanding the cortical activity patterns driving dexterous upper limb motion has the potential to benefit a broad clinical population living with limited mobility through the development of novel brain-computer interface (BCI) technology. The present study examines the activity of ensembles of motor cortical neurons recorded using microelectrode arrays in the dominant hemisphere of two BrainGate clinical trial participants with cervical spinal cord injury as they attempted to perform a set of 48 different hand gestures. Although each participant displayed a unique organization of their respective neural latent spaces, it was possible to achieve classification accuracies of ∼70% for all 48 gestures (and ∼90% for sets of 10). Our results show that single unit ensemble activity recorded in a single hemisphere of human precentral gyrus has the potential to generate a wide range of gesture-related signals across both hands, providing an intuitive and diverse set of potential command signals for intracortical BCI use.
Competing Interest Statement
Declaration of Interests The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of NIH or the Department of Veterans Affairs or the United States Government. The MGH Translational Research Center has clinical research support agreements with Neuralink, Synchron, Reach Neuro, Axoft, and Precision Neuro, for which LRH provides consultative input. MGH is a subcontractor on an NIH SBIR with Paradromics. JMH is a consultant for Neuralink and Paradromics, serves on the Medical Advisory Board of Enspire DBS, is a co-founder of Re-EmergeDBS and is a shareholder in Maplight Therapeutics. He is also an inventor on intellectual property licensed by Stanford University to Blackrock Neurotech and Neuralink.