Brain-computer interface (BCI) is a direct communication pathway between brain and external devices, and BCI-based prosthetic devices are promising to provide new rehabilitation options for people with motor disabilities. Electrocorticography (ECoG) signals contain rich information correlated with motor activities, and have great potential in hand gesture decoding. However, most existing decoders use long time windows, thus ignore the temporal dynamics within the period. In this study, we propose to use recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to exploit the temporal information in ECoG signals for robust hand gesture decoding. With RNN's high nonlinearity modeling ability, our method can effectively capture the temporal information in ECoG time series for robust gesture recognition. In the experiments, we decode three hand gestures using ECoG signals of two participants, and achieve an accuracy of 90%. Specially, we investigate the possibility of recognizing the gestures in a time interval as short as possible after motion onsets. Our method rapidly recognizes gestures within 0.5 s after motion onsets with an accuracy of about 80%. Experimental results also indicate that the temporal dynamics is especially informative for effective and rapid decoding of hand gestures.
Keywords: brain-computer interface; electrocorticography; motor rehabilitation; neural decoding; neural prosthetic control.