Disclosures: Michael D. Guthrie, BS MD: Blackrock Microsystems, Inc.: Other Financial or Material Support, Our University holds an Investigational Device Exemption for a product manufacturer by this company

Objective: To test the hypothesis that distractions requiring increasing cognitive load and simultaneous motor control would impact the performance of an intracortical brain-computer interface (BCI).

Design: Observational study

Setting: Research laboratory

Participants: Two subjects with tetraplegia with intracortical microelectrode arrays implanted into primary motor cortex.

Interventions: Participants used their neural activity to complete the primary task of controlling a robotic arm with a BCI. The goal was to move between two targets as quickly as possible with no distraction and in the presence of secondary distraction tasks including listening to background noise, counting tones, mentally subtracting by threes from a random number, answering conversational questions, and a simultaneous motor task unique to each participant.

Main Outcome Measures: The total number of targets hit in a 60-second trial, the subjective difficulty of each distraction task, and the 3D path efficiency of the robotic arm.

Results: Overall, Subject 2 hit more targets than Subject 1 and also had a lower subjective difficulty rating across all conditions (both P < .001, Wilcoxon Rank Sum). There was no significant difference for either subject in the number of targets hit when comparing the no distraction case to each distraction condition. Subject 1 demonstrated a trend towards significantly less targets hit while completing the simultaneous motor task (P = .071, Wilcoxon Rank Sum). In general, there was no difference in path efficiency when comparing performance with distraction to that without. One exception is that Subject 2 had a lower path efficiency when performing a simultaneous motor task than when using the BCI without distraction (P = .038, Wilcoxon Rank Sum).

Conclusions: The overall performance of an intracortical brain-computer interface in controlling a robotic arm in a simple back and forth motor task proved to be robust to auditory, cognitive, and motor distractions in two subjects.

Level of Evidence: Level I

« Back to AAPM&R Annual Assembly 2019

PM&R Meeting Abstracts - https://pmrjabstracts.org/abstract/the-effect-of-distraction-on-intracortical-brain-computer-interface-performance/