A stabilized dual Kalman filter for adaptive tracking of brain-computer interface decoding parameters

Neural prosthetics are a promising technology for alleviating paralysis by actuating devices directly from the intention to move. Typical implementations of these devices require a calibration session to define decoding parameters that map recorded neural activity into movement of the device. However, a major factor limiting the clinical deployment of this technology is stability: with fixed decoding parameters, control of the prosthetic device has been shown to degrade over time. Here we apply a dual estimation procedure to adaptively capture changes in decoding parameters. In simulation, we find that our stabilized dual Kalman filter can run autonomously for hundreds of thousands of trials with little change in performance. Further, when we apply our algorithm off-line to estimate arm trajectories from neural data recorded over five consecutive days, we find that it outperforms a static Kalman filter, even when it is re-calibrated at the beginning of each day.