A reinforcement learning based software simulator for motor brain-computer interfaces

Intracortical motor brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are expensive and time-consuming to design because accurate evaluation traditionally requires real-time experiments. In a BCI system, a user interacts with an imperfect decoder and continuously changes motor commands in response to unexpected decoded movements. This “closed-loop” nature of BCI leads to emergent interactions between the user and decoder that are challenging to model. The gold standard for BCI evaluation is therefore real-time experiments, which significantly limits the speed and community of BCI research. We present a new BCI simulator that enables researchers to accurately and quickly design BCIs for cursor control entirely in software. Our simulator replaces the BCI user with a deep reinforcement learning (RL) agent that interacts with a simulated BCI system and learns to optimally control it. We demonstrate that our simulator is accurate and versatile, reproducing the published results of three distinct types of BCI decoders: (1) a state-of-the-art linear decoder (FIT-KF), (2) a “two-stage” BCI decoder requiring closed-loop decoder adaptation (ReFIT-KF), and (3) a nonlinear recurrent neural network decoder (FORCE).