Policies for neural prosthetic control: Initial experiments with a text interface

Abstract

Neural interfaces use estimates of brain or muscle activity to generate control inputs for a prosthetic device. Most previous work focuses on estimating neural activity more accurately. This paper focuses on generating better control inputs. It shows that changing the dynamic response of a prosthetic device can make specific tasks easier to accomplish. It also presents experimental results for which neural activity is measured using surface electromyography, the prosthetic is a 1-D cursor, and the task is to spell words from a menu of characters.