Cortically Controlled FES for Restoration and Rehabilitation of Function Following SCI in Rats

We describe here our progress in developing a rat model for cortically controlled functional electrical stimulation (FES). In these experiments we are using neural activity recorded from motor cortex to drive stimulation of paralyzed muscles in order to restore voluntary motor function following spinal cord injury (SCI). We first evaluated the ability of different cortical interfaces to estimate intended movements and muscle activation, determining whether intracortical interfaces were necessary. We found that spiking activity from intracortical electrodes predicted movements with reasonable accuracy, whereas less invasive epidural electrodes performed considerably worse. We are currently evaluating the utility of these approaches to restore function following SCI as well as their ability to rehabilitate function with repeated training.