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1. A Translational Roadmap for a Brain-Machine-Interface (BMI) System for Rehabilitation

   https://doi.org/10.1109/SMC.2019.8914210  

   Craik, Alexander; Kilicarslan, Atilla; Contreras-Vidal, Jose L. (October 2019, 2019 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC))

   In this communication, a translational roadmap for a noninvasive Brain Machine Interface (BMI) system for rehabilitation is presented. This multi-faceted project addresses important engineering, clinical, end user and regulatory challenges. The goal is to improve the feasibility of at-home neurorehabilitation for patients with chronic stroke by providing a low-cost, portable, form fitting, reliable, and easy-to-use system. The proposed BMI system is also designed to enable direct communication between the end-user and clinician, allowing for continuous patient specific rehabilitation optimization. 

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2. At-Home Stroke Neurorehabilitation: Early Findings with the NeuroExo BCI System

   https://doi.org/10.3390/s25051322  

   González-España, Juan José; Sánchez-Rodríguez, Lianne; Pacheco-Ramírez, Maxine Annel; Feng, Jeff; Nedley, Kathryn; Chang, Shuo-Hsiu; Francisco, Gerard E; Contreras-Vidal, Jose L (March 2025, Sensors)

   Background: Democratized access to safe and effective robotic neurorehabilitation for stroke survivors requires innovative, affordable solutions that can be used not only in clinics but also at home. This requires the high usability of the devices involved to minimize costs associated with support from physical therapists or technicians. Methods: This paper describes the early findings of the NeuroExo brain–machine interface (BMI) with an upper-limb robotic exoskeleton for stroke neurorehabilitation. This early feasibility study consisted of a six-week protocol, with an initial training and BMI calibration phase at the clinic followed by 60 sessions of neuromotor therapy at the homes of the participants. Pre- and post-assessments were used to assess users’ compliance and system performance. Results: Participants achieved a compliance rate between 21% and 100%, with an average of 69%, while maintaining adequate signal quality and a positive perceived BMI performance during home usage with an average Likert scale score of four out of five. Moreover, adequate signal quality was maintained for four out of five participants throughout the protocol. These findings provide valuable insights into essential components for comprehensive rehabilitation therapy for stroke survivors. Furthermore, linear mixed-effects statistical models showed a significant reduction in trial duration (p-value < 0.02) and concomitant changes in brain patterns (p-value < 0.02). Conclusions: the analysis of these findings suggests that a low-cost, safe, simple-to-use BMI system for at-home stroke rehabilitation is feasible. 

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3. A low-power communication scheme for wireless, 1000 channel brain–machine interfaces

   https://doi.org/10.1088/1741-2552/ac7352  

   Costello, Joseph T; Nason-Tomaszewski, Samuel R; An, Hyochan; Lee, Jungho; Mender, Matthew J; Temmar, Hisham; Wallace, Dylan M; Lim, Jongyup; Willsey, Matthew S; Patil, Parag G; et al (June 2022, Journal of Neural Engineering)

   Abstract Objective . Brain–machine interfaces (BMIs) have the potential to restore motor function but are currently limited by electrode count and long-term recording stability. These challenges may be solved through the use of free-floating ‘motes’ which wirelessly transmit recorded neural signals, if power consumption can be kept within safe levels when scaling to thousands of motes. Here, we evaluated a pulse-interval modulation (PIM) communication scheme for infrared (IR)-based motes that aims to reduce the wireless data rate and system power consumption. Approach . To test PIM’s ability to efficiently communicate neural information, we simulated the communication scheme in a real-time closed-loop BMI with non-human primates. Additionally, we performed circuit simulations of an IR-based 1000-mote system to calculate communication accuracy and total power consumption. Main results . We found that PIM at 1 kb/s per channel maintained strong correlations with true firing rate and matched online BMI performance of a traditional wired system. Closed-loop BMI tests suggest that lags as small as 30 ms can have significant performance effects. Finally, unlike other IR communication schemes, PIM is feasible in terms of power, and neural data can accurately be recovered on a receiver using 3 mW for 1000 channels. Significance. These results suggest that PIM-based communication could significantly reduce power usage of wireless motes to enable higher channel-counts for high-performance BMIs. 

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4. Feasibility and Effectiveness of a Soft Exoskeleton for Pediatric Rehabilitation

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69547-7_53  

   Lobo, Michele A.; Li, Bai (July 2021, International Symposium on Wearable Robotics: WeRob2020: Wearable Robotics: Challenges and Trends)

   Moreno, J.C. et (Ed.)

   Exoskeletons have the potential to improve outcomes for rehabilitation clients. For these devices to be effective, rehabilitation professionals and end users must be involved throughout the design process, so the devices meet the broad needs of users. In this article, we present a model to guide the design of rehabilitation devices. This model is user-centered and focuses on users’ functional, expressive, aesthetic, and accessibility needs (FEA2) for devices.We then summarize the results of the first studies evaluating the feasibility and effectiveness of the Playskin Lift soft exoskeleton for pediatric populations utilized for intervention in the natural environment. The exoskeleton was feasible for daily use by families in the natural environment. For infants and toddlers with physical disabilities, the exoskeleton assisted reaching and play performance within a single session when it was worn and improved independent reaching function and play activity after months of daily intervention with the exoskeleton. 

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5. SecT: A Lightweight Secure Thing-Centered IoT Communication System

   https://doi.org/10.1109/MASS.2018.00018  

   Gao, Chao; Ling, Zhen; Chen, Biao; Fu, Xinwen; Zhao, Wei (October 2018, 2018 IEEE 15th International Conference on Mobile Ad Hoc and Sensor Systems (MASS))

   In this paper, we propose a secure lightweight and thing-centered IoT communication system based on MQTT, SecT, in which a device/thing authenticates users. Compared with a server-centered IoT system in which a cloud server authenticates users, a thing-centered system preserves user privacy since the cloud server is primarily a relay between things and users and does not store or see user data in plaintext. The contributions of this work are three-fold. First, we explicitly identify critical functionalities in bootstrapping a thing and design secure pairing and binding strategies. Second, we design a strategy of end-to-end encrypted communication between users and things for the sake of user privacy and even the server cannot see the communication content in plaintext. Third, we design a strong authentication system that can defeat known device scanning attack, brute force attack and device spoofing attack against IoT. We implemented a prototype of SecT on a $10 Raspberry Pi Zero W and performed extensive experiments to validate its performance. The experiment results show that SecT is both cost-effective and practical. Although we design SecT for the smart home application, it can be easily extended to other IoT application domains. 

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