A Personalized Multimodal BCI–Soft Robotics System for Rehabilitating Upper Limb Function in Chronic Stroke Patients

Multimodal brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) that combine electrical features from electroencephalography (EEG) and hemodynamic features from functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) have the potential to improve performance. In this paper, we propose a multimodal EEG- and fNIRS-based BCI system with soft robotic (BCI-SR) components for personalized stroke rehabilitation. We propose a novel method of personalizing rehabilitation by aligning each patient’s specific abilities with the treatment options available. We collected 160 single trials of motor imagery using the multimodal BCI from 10 healthy participants. We identified a confounding effect of respiration in the fNIRS signal data collected. Hence, we propose to incorporate a breathing sensor to synchronize motor imagery (MI) cues with the participant’s respiratory cycle. We found that implementing this respiration synchronization (RS) resulted in less dispersed readings of oxyhemoglobin (HbO). We then conducted a clinical trial on the personalized multimodal BCI-SR for stroke rehabilitation. Four chronic stroke patients were recruited to undergo 6 weeks of rehabilitation, three times per week, whereby the primary outcome was measured using upper-extremity Fugl-Meyer Motor Assessment (FMA) and Action Research Arm Test (ARAT) scores on weeks 0, 6, and 12. The results showed a striking coherence in the activation patterns in EEG and fNIRS across all patients. In addition, FMA and ARAT scores were significantly improved on week 12 relative to the pre-trial baseline, with mean gains of 8.75 ± 1.84 and 5.25 ± 2.17, respectively (mean ± SEM). These improvements were all better than the Standard Arm Therapy and BCI-SR group when retrospectively compared to previous clinical trials. These results suggest that personalizing the rehabilitation treatment leads to improved BCI performance compared to standard BCI-SR, and synchronizing motor imagery cues to respiration increased the consistency of HbO levels, leading to better motor imagery performance. These results showed that the proposed multimodal BCI-SR holds promise to better engage stroke patients and promote neuroplasticity for better motor improvements.