Augmented reality system for control of parkinson's symptoms

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Parkinson's disease affects approximately 100,000 Canadians. Tremors and other involuntary movements in Parkinson's patients seriously degrade their quality of life, and are caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain.  Specifically, a lack of the neurochemical dopamine results in a faulty negative feedback signal from the brain to the muscles, which ultimately hinders voluntary movement.  A new collaboration between Drs. Meeko Oishi, Martin McKeown, and Z. Jane Wang, experts in control of hybrid (discrete/continuous) systems, neurology of Parkinson's disease, and biomedical signal processing, respectively, aims to develop a novel complementary alternative.  The equipment requested here will enable new research into the feedback between visual stimuli, brain activity, and motor control in Parkinson's patients. The augmented reality system requested in this proposal will comprise a test-bed for novel non-invasive, non-pharmacological treatment of the symptoms of Parkinson's disease.  Visual stimuli, provided through an augmented reality headset, will be used to interrupt brain signals -- inferred from electroencephalography (EEG) measurements -- that hinder normal movement in patients with Parkinson's disease.    Designing a control law to effectively synthesize visual input signals requires a reasonable mathematical model of the neurological system, as well as meaningful measurements regarding the patient's neurological and physical state.  To this end, neurological experiments will be first designed to deduce the relationship between visual stimuli and voluntary movement.  Biomedical signal processing will enable extraction of relevant biological information from a massive set of data.  Lastly, the control input will be synthesized based on the neurological model and the extracted medical data, using techniques from hybrid control theory.