Quantification of Event-Related Desynchronization Under an Action-Observation Prompting Paradigm

Abstract

Brain-computer interface (BCI)-based rehabilitation techniques have recently shown promise for restoring motor function in stroke survivors. BCIs detect the intent to move in brain signals by identifying a pattern of neural activity called event-related desynchronization (ERD), and then triggering the intended movement by some external modality, such as robotics. BCI-based therapy may be improved by enhancing the ability to detect ERD. This study examined the effect of prompting various motor tasks with action observation (AO) as a paradigm for enhancement of ERD. The magnitude, duration, and latency of ERD as well as the ability of a BCI to detect ERD were compared across several tasks with and without AO-prompting. It was found that AO-prompting reliably produced ERD in motor regions of the brain, but AO-prompted tasks were shorter in duration and smaller in magnitude than alternatively-prompted tasks used for comparison.