Building brain machine interfaces: From rat to monkey

Brain machine interfaces (BMIs), offer a direct path for brain to communicate with outside world, mainly use central neural activities to control artificial external devices. These techniques to collect the brain signals could be distinguished as non-invasive or invasive BMIs according to the position of recoding electrodes. Compared with non-invasive BMIs, invasive BMIs have wide potential in assisting, augmenting or repairing more complex motor functions of human, especially in patients with severe body paralysis. This paper will review our lab´s research work on invasive BMIs with subjects on rat and monkey. We built a synchronous recording and analyzing system for rat´s neural activities and motor behavior. Rat could use its intention to control external one dimensional robotic lever in real time. Also, a remote control training system was designed to realize rat navigating through 3D obstacle route, as well as switching between “motion” and “motionlessness” at any point during the route. We further extended our work to develop the invasive BMI system on non-human primate. While the monkey was trained to perform a 2-D center-out task, plenty of neural activities in motor cortex were invasively recorded. We showed the preliminary decoding results of the 2D trajectory, and plan to utilize the decoded prediction to control an external device, such as robot hand.