Virtual typing by people with tetraplegia using a self-calibrating intracortical brain-computer interface

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) promise to restore independence for people with severe motor disabilities by translating decoded neural activity directly into the control of a computer. However, recorded neural signals are not stationary (that is, can change over time), degrading the quality of decoding. Requiring users to pause what they are doing whenever signals change to perform decoder recalibration routines is time-consuming and impractical for everyday use of BCIs. We demonstrate that signal nonstationarity in an intracortical BCI can be mitigated automatically in software, enabling long periods (hours to days) of self-paced point-and-click typing by people with tetraplegia, without degradation in neural control. Three key innovations were included in our approach: tracking the statistics of the neural activity during self-timed pauses in neural control, velocity bias correction during neural control, and periodically recalibrating the decoder using data acquired during typing by mapping neural activity to movement intentions that are inferred retrospectively based on the user's self-selected targets. These methods, which can be extended to a variety of neurally controlled applications, advance the potential for intracortical BCIs to help restore independent communication and assistive device control for people with paralysis.