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To improve mobility and rehabilitation, precise and adaptive control mechanisms have been developed for lower limb exoskeletons. Brain-computer interface (BCI) provides advanced and intuitive control of assistive and rehabilitation exoskeletons to aid the user. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a non-invasive, and portable brain imaging modality, gained momentum in rehabilitation studies in the last decade. This study provides a novel approach to control a lower limb exoskeleton with enhanced classification accuracy using fNIRS-based BCI, the k-nearest neighbors (kNN) classifier, and optimal feature combination. The brain signals were acquired using fNIRS for walking vs rest for twenty healthy participants, having ten trials for each participant. The statistical measures: mean, peak, variance, skewness, kurtosis, and slope are extracted as features. Optimal feature combination was analyzed and selected for enhanced classification accuracy. kNN was analyzed and selected as an optimal classifier with optimal ‘k’ (number of nearest neighboring data points that the kNN considers while classifying a new data point) using elbow method to improve classification performance. The proposed method achieves an average classification accuracy of $88.19~\pm ~2.55$ %, in offline configuration. In order to control exoskeleton in online settings, simulated online classification was performed using one unknown trial, fed as real-time signal. Sliding window of 2.5 sec is used and achieved average classification accuracy of 97.5%. This research represents a major advancement in user-centric assistive technologies and advances the field of neuro-powered exoskeletons. It also lays the groundwork for future advancements in the integration of neuroimaging, machine learning, and rehabilitation. |
