Deep Learning of Movement Intent and Reaction Time for EEG-informed Adaptation of Rehabilitation Robots

Mounting evidence suggests that adaptation is a crucial mechanism for rehabilitation robots in promoting motor learning. Yet, it is commonly based on robot-derived movement kinematics, which is a rather subjective measurement of performance, especially in the presence of a sensorimotor impairment. Here, we propose a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) that uses electroencephalography (EEG) as an objective measurement of two kinematics components that are typically used to assess motor learning and thereby adaptation: i) the intent to initiate a goal-directed movement, and ii) the reaction time (RT) for that movement. We evaluated our CNN on data acquired from an in-house experiment where 12 healthy subjects moved a rehabilitation robotic arm in four directions on a plane, in response to visual stimuli. Our CNN achieved average test accuracies of 80.08% and 79.82% in a binary classification of the intent (intent vs. no intent) and RT (slow vs. fast), respectively. Our results demonstrate how individual movement components implicated in distinct types of motor learning can be predicted from synchronized EEG data acquired before the start of the movement. Our approach can, therefore, inform robotic adaptation in real-time and has the potential to further improve one’s ability to perform the rehabilitation task.