Identification of a self-paced hitting task in freely moving rats based on adaptive spike detection from multi-unit M1 cortical signals.

Invasive brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) may prove to be a useful rehabilitation tool for severely disabled patients. Although some systems have shown to work well in restricted laboratory settings, their usefulness must be tested in less controlled environments. Our objective was to investigate if a specific motor task could reliably be detected from multi-unit intra-cortical signals from freely moving animals.