Wearable fNIRS device of high-density channel arrangement for use in neurorehabilitation

Abstract

Recent brain lesion studies reported that the impaired brain function is compensatively played by a brain region other than the irreversibly lesioned region. For prognosis prediction, supporting willingness to recover, and maximizing functional recovery, the monitoring of plastic change in brain function among the relevant regions will be crucially important. Such brain monitoring during rehabilitative training may be non-invasively possible through the functional near-infrared spectroscopy; however, the currently available devices have some drawbacks such as 1) the channel interval is larger than the width of human cerebral gyrus and 2) signal contamination from scalp blood cannot be removed in real-time. To overcome each drawback, we proposed and verified the techniques: the triangular bidirectional measurement (Yamada et al., 2018) and the hemodynamic modality separation (Yamada et al., 2012), respectively. In this paper, we report the prototyping and evaluation of a new wearable fNIRS device implemented with these techniques.