MTRT: Motion Trajectory Reconstruction Transformer for EEG-Based BCI Decoding

Abstract

Brain computer interface (BCI) is a system that directly uses brain neural activities to communicate with the outside world. Recently, the decoding of the human upper limb based on electroencephalogram (EEG) signals has become an important research branch of BCI. Even though existing research models are capable of decoding upper limb trajectories, the performance needs to be improved to make them more practical for real-world applications. This study is attempt to reconstruct the continuous and nonlinear multi-directional upper limb trajectory based on Chinese sign language. Here, to reconstruct the upper limb motion trajectory effectively, we propose a novel Motion Trajectory Reconstruction Transformer (MTRT) neural network that utilizes the geometric information of human joint points and EEG neural activity signals to decode the upper limb trajectory. Specifically, we use human upper limb bone geometry properties as reconstruction constraints to obtain more accurate trajectory information of the human upper limbs. Furthermore, we propose a MTRT neural network based on this constraint, which uses the shoulder, elbow, and wrist joint point information and EEG signals of brain neural activity during upper limb movement to train its parameters. To validate the model, we collected the synchronization information of EEG signals and upper limb motion joint points of 20 subjects. The experimental results show that the reconstruction model can accurately reconstruct the motion trajectory of the shoulder, elbow, and wrist of the upper limb, achieving superior performance than the compared methods. This research is very meaningful to decode the limb motion parameters for BCI, and it is inspiring for the motion decoding of other limbs and other joints.

Keywords

• Brain computer interface
• EEG
• limb motion decoding
• trajectory reconstruction
• transformer
• motor execution