A Study on the Effect of Electrical Stimulation During Motor Imagery Learning in Brain-Computer Interfacing

Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) stimulates the affected region of the human body thus providing a neuroprosthetic interface to non-recovered muscle groups. FES in combination with Brain-computer interfacing (BCI) has a wide scope in rehabilitation because this system can directly link the cerebral motor intention of the users with its corresponding peripheral mucle activations. Such a rehabilitative system would contribute to improve the cortical and peripheral learning and thus, improve the recovery time of the patients. In this paper, we examine the effect of electrical stimulation by FES on the electroencephalography (EEG) during learning of a motor imagery task. The subjects are asked to perform four motor imagery tasks over six sessions and the features from the EEG are extracted using common spatial algorithm and decoded using linear discriminant analysis classifier. Feedback is provided in form of a visual medium and electrical stimulation representing the distance of the features from the hyperplane. Results suggest a significant improvement in the classification accuracy when the subject was induced with electrical stimulation along with visual feedback as compared to the standard visual one.