No Arabic abstract
The relationship between physiological systems and modern electromechanical technologies is fast becoming intimate with high degrees of complex interaction. It can be argued that muscular function, limb movements, and touch perception serve supervisory functions for movement control in motion and touch-based (e.g. manipulable) devices/interfaces and human-machine interfaces in general. To get at this hypothesis requires the use of novel techniques and analyses which demonstrate the multifaceted and regulatory role of adaptive physiological processes in these interactions. Neuromechanics is an approach that unifies the role of physiological function, motor performance, and environmental effects in determining human performance. A neuromechanical perspective will be used to explain the effect of environmental fluctuations on supervisory mechanisms, which leads to adaptive physiological responses. Three experiments are presented using two different types of virtual environment that allowed for selective switching between two sets of environmental forces. This switching was done in various ways to maximize the variety of results. Electromyography (EMG) and kinematic information contributed to the development of human performance-related measures. Both descriptive and specialized analyses were conducted: peak amplitude analysis, loop trace analysis, and the analysis of unmatched muscle power. Results presented here provide a window into performance under a range of conditions. These analyses also demonstrated myriad consequences for force-related fluctuations on dynamic physiological regulation. The findings presented here could be applied to the dynamic control of touch-based and movement-sensitive human-machine systems. In particular, the design of systems such as human-robotic systems, touch screen devices, and rehabilitative technologies could benefit from this research.
Understanding how agents learn to generalize -- and, in particular, to extrapolate -- in high-dimensional, naturalistic environments remains a challenge for both machine learning and the study of biological agents. One approach to this has been the use of function learning paradigms, which allow peoples empirical patterns of generalization for smooth scalar functions to be described precisely. However, to date, such work has not succeeded in identifying mechanisms that acquire the kinds of general purpose representations over which function learning can operate to exhibit the patterns of generalization observed in human empirical studies. Here, we present a framework for how a learner may acquire such representations, that then support generalization -- and extrapolation in particular -- in a few-shot fashion. Taking inspiration from a classic theory of visual processing, we construct a self-supervised encoder that implements the basic inductive bias of invariance under topological distortions. We show the resulting representations outperform those from other models for unsupervised time series learning in several downstream function learning tasks, including extrapolation.
Objective: Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a rare disease, but is also one of the most common motor neuron diseases, and people of all races and ethnic backgrounds are affected. There is currently no cure. Brain computer interfaces (BCIs) can establish a communication channel directly between the brain and an external device by recognizing brain activities that reflect user intent. Therefore, this technology could help ALS patients in promoting functional independence through BCI-based speller systems and motor assistive devices. Methods: In this paper, two kinds of ERP-based speller systems were tested on 18 ALS patients to: (1) assess performance when they spelled 42 characters online continuously, without a break; and (2) to compare performance between a matrix-based speller paradigm (MS-P, mean visual angle 6 degree) and a new speller paradigm that used a larger visual angle called the large visual angle speller paradigm (LS-P, mean visual angle 8 degree). Results: Although results showed that there were no significant differences between the two paradigms in accuracy trend over continuous use (p>0.05), the fatigue during the LS-P condition was significantly lower than that of MS-P (p<0.05). Results also showed that continuous use slightly reduced the performance of this ERP-based BCI. Conclusion: 15 subjects obtained higher than 80% feedback accuracy (online output accuracy) and 9 subjects obtained higher than 90% feedback accuracy in one of the two paradigms, thus validating the BCI approaches in this study. Significance: Most ALS subjects in this study could spell effectively after continuous use of an ERP-based BCI. The new LS-P display may be easier for subjects to use, resulting in lower fatigue.
Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) can provide an alternative means of communication for individuals with severe neuromuscular limitations. The P300-based BCI speller relies on eliciting and detecting transient event-related potentials (ERPs) in electroencephalography (EEG) data, in response to a user attending to rarely occurring target stimuli amongst a series of non-target stimuli. However, in most P300 speller implementations, the stimuli to be presented are randomly selected from a limited set of options and stimulus selection and presentation are not optimized based on previous user data. In this work, we propose a data-driven method for stimulus selection based on the expected discrimination gain metric. The data-driven approach selects stimuli based on previously observed stimulus responses, with the aim of choosing a set of stimuli that will provide the most information about the users intended target character. Our approach incorporates knowledge of physiological and system constraints imposed due to real-time BCI implementation. Simulations were performed to compare our stimulus selection approach to the row-column paradigm, the conventional stimulus selection method for P300 spellers. Results from the simulations demonstrated that our adaptive stimulus selection approach has the potential to significantly improve performance from the conventional method: up to 34% improvement in accuracy and 43% reduction in the mean number of stimulus presentations required to spell a character in a 72-character grid. In addition, our greedy approach to stimulus selection provides the flexibility to accommodate design constraints.
We describe the experimental procedures for a dataset that we have made publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2649006 in mat and csv formats. This dataset contains electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings of 25 subjects testing the Brain Invaders (Congedo, 2011), a visual P300 Brain-Computer Interface inspired by the famous vintage video game Space Invaders (Taito, Tokyo, Japan). The visual P300 is an event-related potential elicited by a visual stimulation, peaking 240-600 ms after stimulus onset. EEG data were recorded by 16 electrodes in an experiment that took place in the GIPSA-lab, Grenoble, France, in 2012 (Van Veen, 2013 and Congedo, 2013). Python code for manipulating the data is available at https://github.com/plcrodrigues/py.BI.EEG.2012-GIPSA. The ID of this dataset is BI.EEG.2012-GIPSA.
During mechanical ventilation, patient-ventilator disharmony is frequently observed and may result in increased breathing effort, compromising the patients comfort and recovery. This circumstance requires clinical intervention and becomes challenging when verbal communication is difficult. In this work, we propose a brain computer interface (BCI) to automatically and non-invasively detect patient-ventilator disharmony from electroencephalographic (EEG) signals: a brain-ventilator interface (BVI). Our framework exploits the cortical activation provoked by the inspiratory compensation when the subject and the ventilator are desynchronized. Use of a one-class approach and Riemannian geometry of EEG covariance matrices allows effective classification of respiratory states. The BVI is validated on nine healthy subjects that performed different respiratory tasks that mimic a patient-ventilator disharmony. Classification performances, in terms of areas under ROC curves, are significantly improved using EEG signals compared to detection based on air flow. Reduction in the number of electrodes that can achieve discrimination can often be desirable (e.g. for portable BCI systems). By using an iterative channel selection technique, the Common Highest Order Ranking (CHOrRa), we find that a reduced set of electrodes (n=6) can slightly improve for an intra-subject configuration, and it still provides fairly good performances for a general inter-subject setting. Results support the discriminant capacity of our approach to identify anomalous respiratory states, by learning from a training set containing only normal respiratory epochs. The proposed framework opens the door to brain-ventilator interfaces for monitoring patients breathing comfort and adapting ventilator parameters to patient respiratory needs.