Detecting voluntary gait intention of chronic stroke patients towards top-down gait rehabilitation using EEG

One of the recent trends in gait rehabilitation is to incorporate bio-signals, such as electromyography (EMG) or electroencephalography (EEG), for facilitating neuroplasticity, i.e. top-down approach. In this study, we investigated decoding stroke patients' gait intention through a wireless EEG system. To overcome patient-specific EEG patterns due to impaired cerebral cortices, common spatial patterns (CSP) was employed. We demonstrated that CSP filter can be used to maximize the EEG signal variance-ratio of gait and standing conditions. Finally, linear discriminant analysis (LDA) classification was conducted, whereby the average accuracy of 73.2% and the average delay of 0.13 s were achieved for 3 chronic stroke patients. Additionally, we also found out that the inverse CSP matrix topography of stroke patients' EEG showed good agreement with the patients' paretic side.