Closed-loop sensorimotor BCI

The functioning system in which decoded motor commands drive an effector and the sensory consequences of that action are fed back to the brain, via ICMS or a substitute channel, in real time, closing the perception–action loop rather than merely coexisting as separate read and write paths. It is the operational realization of a bidirectional BCI in a control-theoretic sense: sensory feedback becomes part of the loop that shapes the next motor command.

Demonstrated benefits are functional, not just phenomenological: adding ICMS touch feedback to an intracortical grasp task roughly halved the time to locate and transfer objects, because the participant no longer relied solely on vision to know when contact occurred. The engineering requirement is low, well-characterized end-to-end latency and temporally aligned, contingent feedback; feedback that lags or is not contingent on the user's own action fails to integrate into natural control.