Design of a neural decoder by sensory prediction and error correction

Brain-machine interfaces (BMI) hold great potential to improve the quality of life of many patients with disabilities. The neural decoder, which expresses the mapping between the neural signals and the subject's motion, plays an important role in BMI systems. Conventional neural decoders are generally in the form of a kinematic Kalman filter which does not possess an explicit mechanism to deal with the unavoidable mismatch between the biological system and the model of the system used by the decoder. This paper presents a novel design of a neural decoder that uses a one-step model predictive controller to generate a control signal that compensates for the inherent model mismatch. The effectiveness of the proposed decoding algorithm compares favorably to the state-of-the-art Kalman filter in numerical simulations with different degrees of model mismatch.