Long-term unsupervised recalibration of cursor-based intracortical brain–computer interfaces using a hidden Markov model

Intracortical brain-computer interfaces (iBCIs) require frequent recalibration to maintain robust performance due to changes in neural activity that accumulate over time, which result in periods when users cannot use their device. Here we introduce a hidden Markov model to infer which targets users are moving towards during iBCI use and we retrain the system using these inferred targets, enabling unsupervised adaptation to changing neural activity. Our approach outperforms distribution alignment methods in large-scale, closed-loop simulations over two months, as well as in a closed loop with a human iBCI user over one month. Leveraging an offline dataset spanning five years of iBCI recordings, we show how target inference recalibration methods appear capable of long-term unsupervised recalibration, whereas recently proposed data-distribution-matching approaches appear to accumulate compounding errors over time. We show offline that our approach performs well on freeform datasets of a person using a home computer with an iBCI. Our results demonstrate the use of task structure to bootstrap a noisy decoder into a highly performant one, thereby overcoming one of the major barriers to clinically translating BCIs.