Wearable Brain-Computer Interface for Treating Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) With A Neural Replacement Strategy

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Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a rapidly progressive neurodegenerative disease of motor neurons leading to wasting, paralysis, and eventual death from respiratory failure within 3 to 5 years. It is an age-related disease, with symptoms most commonly develop between the ages of 55 and 75. With the increase of population aged 60 and over, there is projected 69% global increase in the number of ALS cases worldwide by 2040, and 30% increase in UK cases. The increase will add at least an additional USD $95 million to the current healthcare costs in the UK. There is currently no cure for ALS. Functional electrical stimulation (FES), which has been widely used in treating muscle paralysis, has limited effect on ALS due to the progressive loss of motor neurons. UCL have been developing a novel neural replacement strategy for ALS treatment that is capable of restoring functional control of paralysed muscles. This advanced therapy engrafts stem cell-derived motor neurons into peripheral motor nerves that supply specific target muscles, combined with a fully implantable optogenetic stimulator performing controlled, highly-selective optical stimulation, to restore a wide range of motor functions to ALS patients. As part of the ongoing efforts to develop a combined therapy to restore essential activities of daily life (ADL) in ALS patients, this PhD study aims to develop a non-invasive, miniaturised brain-computer interface (BCI) that is wirelessly coupled to an implantable optogenetic stimulator to restore voluntarily controlled movement. The study will explore algorithms that can accurately detect and classify motion intention in real-time from brain activities using non-invasive electroencephalogram (EEG), and the power/area-efficient hardware implementation for EEG detection, classification and wireless integration with neural modulation to facilitate muscle contraction.This PhD study addresses EPSRC's Healthcare technologies themes "Developing new therapies" and "Expanding the frontiers of physical intervention".