Research

The overarching objective of CNBI’s research is to bring brain-machine interfaces (BMI) out of the laboratory into the daily life of people, in particular those with severe disabilities. To do so, we tackle three major scientific challenges:

• deploying BMI systems in the clinical realm to promote neural plasticity and functional recovery of patients;
• designing novel BMI paradigms to augment interaction experience in our daily activities;
• developing new principles to facilitate user’s acquisition of BMI skills.

We also believe that these three aims can only be probed, advanced and demonstrated by engaging BMI users in long-term use of complex brain-controlled devices. In our quest, we depart from a dominant view in the BMI field, where the usual question researchers ask is “how to improve decoding of user’s intention?”. Although this aspect is certainly central and we don’t neglect it, we rather ask “how to facilitate subject’s acquisition of BMI skills?”