Study Status: Recruiting
Recruit Status: Recruiting
Study Type: Observational
Official Title: Brain Computer Interface Based Communication in the Completely Locked-In State
Brief Summary: Despite partial success, communication has remained impossible for persons suffering from complete motor paralysis but intact cognitive and emotional processing, a state called complete locked-in state (CLIS).Very recently NIRS was successfully used to investigate the functional activations in the cortex of a CLIS patient in response to auditorily presented stimuli containing correct or incorrect statements and open questions. The hemodynamic change in the motor cortex of the CLIS patient was recorded across many sessions spread over more than a year and was used to train a classifier to predict the "yes" and "no" answering pattern of the CLIS patient who was previously trained to use an electroencephalography (EEG) based brain computer interface (BCI) without success. The trained classifier was able to provide online feedback ("your answer was classified as (in) correct") to the patient with performance rate of 71.76%. This is the first carefully documented case of communication in a CLIS patient with BCI, which holds promise and raises the hope for communication in CLIS. Hence, to further validate the preliminary findings of our lab and refine the technology of functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS)-based BCI for communication in CLIS-patients extensive studies will be carried out on CLIS patients using fNIRS based BCIs.