Closed-Loop Brain–Machine–Body Interfaces for Noninvasive Rehabilitation of Movement Disorders

Traditional approaches for neurological rehabili- tation of patients affected with movement disorders, such as Parkinson's disease (PD), dystonia, and essential tremor (ET) consist mainly of oral medication, physical therapy, and botulinum toxin injections. Recently, the more invasive method of deep brain stimulation (DBS) showed significant improvement of the physical symptoms associated with these disorders. In the past several years, the adoption of feedback control theory helped DBS protocols to take into account the progressive and dynamic nature of these neurological move- ment disorders that had largely been ignored so far. As a result, a more efficient and effective management of PD cardinal symptoms has emerged. In this paper, we review closed-loop systems for rehabilitation of movement disor- ders, focusing on PD, for which several invasive and noninvasive methods have been developed during the last decade, reducing the complications and side effects associ- ated with traditional rehabilitation approaches and paving the way for tailored individual therapeutics. We then present a novel, transformative, noninvasive closed-loop framework based on force neurofeedback and discuss several future developments of closed-loop systems that might bring us closer to individualized solutions for neurological rehabilita- tion of movement disorders.