Neuromorphic decoding of spinal motor neuron behaviour during natural hand movements for a new generation of wearable neural interfaces
Author(s)
Tanzarella, Simone
Iacono, Massimiliano
Donati, Elisa
Farina, Dario
Bartolozzi, Chiara
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
We propose a neuromorphic framework to process the activity of human spinal motor neurons for movement intention recognition. This framework is integrated into a non-invasive interface that decodes the activity of motor neurons innervating intrinsic and extrinsic hand muscles. One of the main limitations of current neural interfaces is that machine learning models cannot exploit the efficiency of the spike encoding operated by the nervous system. Spiking-based pattern recognition would detect the spatio-temporal sparse activity of a neuronal pool and lead to adaptive and compact implementations, eventually running locally in embedded systems. Emergent Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) have not yet been used for processing the activity of in-vivo human neurons. Here we developed a convolutional SNN to process a total of 467 spinal motor neurons whose activity was identified in 5 participants while executing 10 hand movements. The classification accuracy approached 0.95 ±0.14 for both isometric and non-isometric contractions. These results show for the first time the potential of highly accurate motion intent detection by combining non-invasive neural interfaces and SNN.
Date Issued
2023
Date Acceptance
2023-07-11
Citation
IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering, 2023, 31, pp.3035-3046
ISSN
1534-4320
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Start Page
3035
End Page
3046
Journal / Book Title
IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering
Volume
31
Copyright Statement
© 2023 The Author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
License URL
Identifier
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37450365
Subjects
Hand
Humans
Motor Neurons
Neural Networks, Computer
Recognition, Psychology
Wearable Electronic Devices
Publication Status
Published
Coverage Spatial
United States
Date Publish Online
2023-07-14