The Primary Motor Cortex Represents Unilateral and Bilateral Movements of Elbows and Wrists – a Pilot Study

Motor commands for the elbow and wrist generally arise from contralateral motor cortex. However, ipsilateral motor cortex also shows correlated responses despite the lack of direct connection. To investigate the activities of primary motor cortex (M1) neurons to bilateral movements, we recorded neural responses to attempted unilateral and bilateral movements of elbows and wrists. The intracortical electrode arrays are implanted in left M1 area correlated with elbow and shoulder. Then we investigated the classification accuracy and the possibility of controlling bilateral exoskeletons through Brain-Computer Interface (BCI). We found left M1 neurons encode both unilateral and bilateral movements of both elbows and wrists. The bilateral movement encoding patterns were more correlated with contralateral movement than ipsilateral movement. In addition, we got high classification accuracy and found the participant can control exoskeletons well in online experiments.