Abstract: A system using neurological control signals to control a device is disclosed. The system may include a sensor sensing electrical activity of a plurality of neurons over time and a vector generator generating a neural control vector from the sensed electrical activity of the plurality of neurons over time. The system may also include a control filter to which the neural control vector is applied to provide a control variable and an output device controlled by the control variable.

Abstract: A continuous tracking task and multielectrode recording was used to describe position and velocity information encoding and decoding in primate motor cortex during visually guided hand motion. The pursuit tracking task (PTT) controls hand motion to remove statistical dependencies among kinematics and neural activity, provides reasonable data stationarity, and a broad sample of velocity and position space allowing description of the time varying features of MI tuning for hand motion. MI has a continuous contribution to visually guided hand motion. The amount of information for each cell was low and restricted to the slow components of movement. Decoding using a linear regression method confirms that position and velocity information can be recovered from the firing of ensembles of MI neurons and demonstrates that MI firing contains sufficient information to predict any future hand trajectory with moderate accuracy based on the firing patterns of small numbers of regionally associated MI neuron populations.