A Hybrid FPGA-Based System for EEG- and EMG-Based Online Movement Prediction

A current trend in the development of assistive devices for rehabilitation, for example exoskeletons or active orthoses, is to utilize physiological data to enhance their functionality and usability, for example by predicting the patient’s upcoming movements using electroencephalography (EEG) or electromyography (EMG). However, these modalities have different temporal properties and classification accuracies, which results in specific advantages and disadvantages. To use physiological data analysis in rehabilitation devices, the processing should be performed in real-time, guarantee close to natural movement onset support, provide high mobility, and should be performed by miniaturized systems that can be embedded into the rehabilitation device. We present a novel Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) -based system for real-time movement prediction using physiological data. Its parallel processing capabilities allows the combination of movement predictions based on EEG and EMG and additionally a P300 detection, which is likely evoked by instructions of the therapist. The system is evaluated in an offline and an online study with twelve healthy subjects in total. We show that it provides a high computational performance and significantly lower power consumption in comparison to a standard PC. Furthermore, despite the usage of fixed-point computations, the proposed system achieves a classification accuracy similar to systems with double precision floating-point precision.