Restoring rapid natural bimanual typing with a neuroprosthesis after paralysis

Recognizing keyboard typing as a familiar, high information rate
communication paradigm, we developed an intracortical brain computer
interface (iBCI) typing neuroprosthesis providing bimanual QWERTY keyboard
functionality for people with paralysis. Typing with this iBCI involves
only attempted finger movements, which are decoded accurately with as few
as 30 calibration sentences. Sentence decoding is improved using a 5-gram
language model. This typing neuroprosthesis performed well for two iBCI
clinical trial participants with tetraplegia - one with ALS and one with
spinal cord injury. Typing speed is user-regulated, reaching 110
characters per minute, resulting in 22 words per minute with a word error
rate of 1.6 %. This resembles able-bodied typing accuracy and provides
higher throughput than current state-of-the-art hand motor iBCI decoding.
In summary, a typing neuroprosthesis decoding finger movements provides an
intuitive, familiar, and easy-to-learn paradigm for individuals with
impaired communication due to paralysis. This dataset contains all of the
neural activity recorded during these experiments, consisting of data from
two BrainGate2 Clinical Trial participants. The neural activity was
recorded with six microlectrode arrays implanted in the motor cortex of
each participant. The dataset also contains all of the real-time outputs
of the typing iBCI.