Enhancing lower-limb motor imagery using a paradigm with visual and spatiotemporal tactile synchronized stimulation

<i>Objective.</i>Vibrotactile stimulation (VS) has been widely used as an appropriate motor imagery (MI) guidance strategy to improve MI performance. However, most VS induced by a single vibrator cannot provide spatiotemporal information of tactile sensation associated with the visual guidance of the imagined motion process, not vividly providing MI guidance for subjects.<i>Approach.</i>This paper proposed a paradigm with visual and spatiotemporal tactile synchronized stimulation (VSTSS) to provide vivid MI guidance to help subjects perform lower-limb MI tasks and improve MI-based brain-computer interface (MI-BCI) performance, with a focus on poorly performing subjects. The proposed paradigm provided subjects with the natural spatiotemporal tactile sensation associated with the visual guidance of the foot movement process during MI. Fourteen healthy subjects were recruited to participate in the MI and Rest tasks and divided into good and poor performers. Furthermore, electrophysiological features and classification performance were analyzed to assess motor cortical activation and MI-BCI performance under no VS (NVS), VS, and VSTSS.<i>Main results.</i>The phenomenon of event-related desynchronization (ERD) in the sensorimotor cortex during MI under the VSTSS was more pronounced compared to the NVS and VS. Specifically, the VSTSS could improve the average ERD values in the motor cortex during the task segment by 34.70% and 14.28% than the NVS and VS in the alpha rhythm for poor performers, respectively. Additionally, the VSTSS could significantly enhance the classification accuracy between the MI and Rest tasks by 12.52% and 4.05% compared to NVS and VS for poor performers, respectively.<i>Significance.</i>The proposed paradigm could enhance motor cortical activation during MI and improve classification performance by providing vivid MI guidance for subjects, offering a promise for the application of lower-limb MI-BCI in stroke rehabilitation in the future.