Bypassing the Natural Visual-Motor Pathway to Execute Complex Movement Related Tasks Using Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Sets

IEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng. 2017 Jan;25(1):88-102. doi: 10.1109/TNSRE.2016.2580580. Epub 2016 Jun 14.

Abstract

In visual-motor coordination, the human brain processes visual stimuli representative of complex motion-related tasks at the occipital lobe to generate the necessary neuronal signals for the parietal and pre-frontal lobes, which in turn generates movement related plans to excite the motor cortex to execute the actual tasks. The paper introduces a novel approach to provide rehabilitative support to patients suffering from neurological damage in their pre-frontal, parietal and/or motor cortex regions. An attempt to bypass the natural visual-motor pathway is undertaken using interval type-2 fuzzy sets to generate the approximate EEG response of the damaged pre-frontal/parietal/motor cortex from the occipital EEG signals. The approximate EEG response is used to trigger a pre-trained joint coordinate generator to obtain the desired joint coordinates of the link end-points of a robot imitating the human subject. The robot arm is here employed as a rehabilitative aid in order to move each link end-points to the desired locations in the reference coordinate system by appropriately activating its links using the well-known inverse kinematics approach. The mean-square positional errors obtained for each link end-points is found within acceptable limits for all experimental subjects including subjects with partial parietal damage, indicating a possible impact of the proposed approach in rehabilitative robotics. Subjective variation in EEG features over different sessions of experimental trials is modeled here using interval type-2 fuzzy sets for its inherent power to handle uncertainty. Experiments undertaken confirm that interval type-2 fuzzy realization outperforms its classical type-1 counterpart and back-propagation neural approaches in all experimental cases, considering link positional error as a metric. The proposed research offers a new opening for the development of possible rehabilitative aids for people with partial impairment in visual-motor coordination.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Brain-Computer Interfaces*
  • Cerebral Cortex / physiopathology*
  • Electroencephalography / methods*
  • Fuzzy Logic
  • Humans
  • Man-Machine Systems
  • Middle Aged
  • Movement Disorders / physiopathology*
  • Movement Disorders / rehabilitation
  • Movement*
  • Neural Pathways*
  • Neurological Rehabilitation / instrumentation
  • Neurological Rehabilitation / methods
  • Pattern Recognition, Automated / methods
  • Psychomotor Performance*
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Robotics / instrumentation
  • Robotics / methods
  • Sensitivity and Specificity