A brain machine interface for control of prosthetic devices is provided. In its control, the interface utilizes parallel control of a continuous decoder and a discrete action state decoder. In the discrete decoding, we not only learn states affiliated with the task, but also states related to the velocity of the prosthetic device and the engagement of the user. Moreover, we not only learn the distributions of the neural signals in these states, but we also learn the interactions/transitions between the states, which is crucial to enabling a relatively higher level of performance of the prosthetic device. Embodiments according to this parallel control system enable us to reliably decode not just task-related states, but any “discrete action state,” in parallel with a neural prosthetic “continuous decoder,” to achieve new state-of-the-art levels of performance in brain-machine interfaces.
Brain machine interface utilizing a discrete action state decoder in parallel with a continuous decoder for a neural prosthetic device