Restoring High Dimensional Hand Function to Persons With Chronic High Tetraplegia
Restoring High Dimensional Hand Function to Persons With Chronic High Tetraplegia
This study is for people who have a paralyzed arm and hand from a spinal cord injury, who
 have also received a recording electrode array in the brain as part of the BrainGate study.
 The study will look at the ability of these participants to control different grasping
 patterns of the hand, both in virtual reality and in his/her actual hand. Movement of the
 participant's hand is controlled by a functional electrical stimulation (FES) system, which
 involves small electrodes implanted in the arm, shoulder and hand that use small electrical
 currents to activate the appropriate muscles.
This work aims to advance Brain-Computer-Interfaces (BCls) to provide severely paralyzed
 persons a natural way of controlling Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) neuroprostheses
 for restoring arm and dexterous hand movements. The prospect of using BCI technology for
 restoring arm and hand movements for reaching and grasping is based on the hypothesis that in
 a paralyzed human, there is a repeatable and understandable relationship between recordable
 brain activity and specific aspects of imagined arm movements. Many previous studies have
 attempted to understand the relationships between brain activity and arm and hand movements
 in able-bodied monkeys. Little is known about these same relationships in humans, and
 specifically within the context of trying to control an FES arm and complex hand system. This
 study will recruit persons who already have BCI and FES systems implanted to take advantage
 of the possibility of recording high resolution brain activity in human participants. Thus,
 from this study, we aim to gain a better understanding of how brain signals are related to
 specific aspects of arm and complex hand movements in humans with paralysis. Additionally,
 this study will test novel implementations of complex hand movement restoration in Veterans
 and other persons with chronic hand and arm paralysis.
Inclusion Criteria:

 -  Cognitively intact (able to follow instructions)

 -  A spinal cord injury resulting in at least partial arm paralysis

 -  Participant in BrainGate2 clinical trial, having already received an intracortical
 array and demonstrated the ability to use the neural signals to control a cursor on a
 monitor.

 Exclusion Criteria:

 -  Profound visual impairments

 -  Participant in BrainGate2 clinical trial with insufficient recordable neural signals
 (such that the researchers cannot decode a movement intention command signal)