Cybernetic Interfaces for the Restoration of Human Movement Through Functional Electrical Stimulation

The objective of this research is to develop an intuitive user interface for functional electrical stimulation (FES), which uses surgically-implanted electrodes to stimulate muscles in spinal cord-injured (SCI) patients. The challenge is to enable high-level tetraplegic patients to regain the use of their own arm. The approach is to develop a multi-modal Bayesian user-intent decoder; use natural muscle synergies to generate appropriate low-dimensional muscle activation signals in a feedforward controller; develop a feedback controller to enhance the performance of the feedforward controller; and test the system with SCI patients on daily living tasks, such as reaching, grasping, and eating.