Publications

@misc{Iossifidis2017a,

title = {Temporal stabilized arm movement for efficient neuroprosthetic control by individuals with tetraplegia},

author = {Ioannis Iossifidis: and Muhammad Ayaz Hussain and Christian Klaes},

year  = {2017},

date = {2017-01-01},

publisher = {SfN 2017},

abstract = {The generation of discrete movement with distinct and stable time courses characterizes each human movement and reflect the need to perform catching and interception tasks and for timed action sequences, incorporating dynamically changing environmental constraints. Several lines of evidence suggest neuronal mechanism for the initiation of movements i.e. in the supplementary motor area (SMA) and the premotor cortex and for movement planning mechanism generating velocity profiles satisfying time constraints. In order to meet the requirements of on-line evolving trajectories we propose a model, based on dynamical systems which describes goal directed trajectories in humans and generates trajectories for redundant anthropomorphic robotic arms The current study aim to evaluate the temporal characteristics of primary motor and posterior parietal cortex in patients with tetraplegia by using inception task implemented in virtual reality. The participants will be implanted with two 96-channel intracortical microelectrode arrays in the Primary Motor and Post Parietal Cortex. In the training phase the participants will be confronted with the observation of a robotic arm intercepting the bob of a pendulum at the lowest point of it's trajectory (maximum velocity) - the end effector reaches at the same time as the bob of the pendulum the lowest point of the trajectory performing a perfectly timed movement. The arm is positioned perpendicular to the oscillation plane exactly at the hight of the interception point to generate a one dimensional trajectory to the target. The time to contact between the robot's end effector and the bob of the pendulum is maintained constant and during the different sessions the distance between end effector and the point of interception is gradually increased. In order to catch up and to reach in time, either velocity formation or initiation time of the movement have to be changed. Both effects will be investigated independently. For the decoding of movement-related information we introduce a framework exploiting a deep learning approach with a convolutional neural networks.},

keywords = {Autonomous robotics, dynamical systems, movement model, neuroprosthetic},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {misc}

}

@misc{Iossifidis2017b,

title = {Low dimensional representation of human arm movement for efficient neuroprosthetic control by individuals with tetraplegia},

author = {Ioannis Iossifidis and C Klaes},

year  = {2017},

date = {2017-01-01},

urldate = {2017-01-01},

publisher = {SfN 2017},

abstract = {Over the last decades the generation mechanism and the representation of goal- directed movements has been a topic of intensive neurophysiological research. The investigation in the motor, premotor, and parietal areas led to the discovery that the direction of hand's movement in space was encoded by populations of neurons in these areas together with many other movement parameters. These distributions of population activation reflect how movements are prepared ahead of movement initiation, as revealed by activity induced by cues that precede the imperative signal (Georgopoulos, 1991). Inspired by those findings a model based on dynamical systems was proposed both, to model goal directed trajectories in humans and to generate trajectories for redundant anthropomorphic robotic arms. The analysis of the attractor dynamics based on the qualitative comparison with measurements of resulting trajectories taken from arm movement experiments with humans (Grimme u. a., 2012) created a framework able to reproduce and to generate naturalistic human like arm trajectories (Iossifidis und Rano, 2013; Iossifidis, Schöner u. a., 2006). The main idea of the methodology is to choose low-dimensional, behavioral va- riables of the goal task can be represented as attractor states of those variables. The movement is generated through a dynamical system with attractors and repellers on the behavioral space, at the goal and constraint positions respectively. When the motion of the robot evolves according to the dynamics of these systems, the behavioral variables will be stabilized at their attractors. Movement is represented by the polar coordinates $phi$,$theta$ of the movement direction (heading direction) and the angular frequency $ømega$ of a hopf oscillator, generating the velocity profile of the arm movement. Therefore, the system dynamics will be expressed in terms of these variables. The target and each obstacle induce vector fields over these variables in a way that states where the hand is moving closer to the target are attractive, while states where it is moving towards an obstacle are repellant. Contributions from different sources are weighted by different factors, e.g. in the vicinity of an obstacle, the contribution from that obstacle must dominate the behavior to guarantee constraint satisfaction (collision prevention). Based on three parameters the presented framework is able to generate temporal stabilized (timed) discrete movements, dealing with disturbances and maintaining an approximately constant movement time. In the current study we will implant two 96-channel intracortical microelectrode arrays in the primary motor and the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) of an individual with tetraplegia. In the training phase the parameters of the dynamical systems will be tuned and optimized by machine learning algorithms. Rather controlling directly the arm movement and adjusting continuously parameters, the patient adjust by his or hers thoughts the three parameters of the dynamics, which remain almost constant during the movement. Only when the motion plan is changing the parameters have to be readjusted. The target directed trajectory evolves from the attractor solution of the dynamical systems equations, which means that the trajectory is generated while the system is in a stable stationary state, a fixed-point attractor. The increase of the degree of assistance lowers the cognitive load of the patient and enables the acknowledgement of the desired task without frustration. In addition we aim to replace the robotic manipulator by an exoskeleton for the upper body which will enable the patients to move his or hers own limbs, which would complete the development of a real neuroprosthetic device for every day use.},

keywords = {BCI, dynamical systems, movement model, neuroprosthetic},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {misc}

}