2026-07-29 00:00 Clinical Recruitment & Enrollment Translated from EN

Portugal's University of Aveiro Registers VR-Based BMI Trial in Spinal Cord Injury

Summary The University of Aveiro in Portugal has registered a study (NCT07732868) testing a brain-machine interface protocol that pairs virtual reality with sensory feedback, visual, auditory and tactile, and/or an exoskeleton in people with spinal cord injury. Participants attend 12 monitored sessions, one a week, each lasting roughly one to two hours, moving a virtual avatar through motor imagery while non-invasive EEG records brain activity. The study focuses on changes in brain activity that track clinical improvement and on how information moves between brain regions, and it collects age, sex, injury level and type, time since injury, functional grade and neuropathic pain; it is at the registration stage with no results yet.

Why it matters The endpoint of interest is neural rather than functional, tracking changes in inter-regional brain communication alongside clinical scores, which is the kind of measurement any claim that BMI training drives recovery, rather than merely accompanying it, will eventually have to rest on.

Aveiro University registered a clinical study (registration NCT07732868) evaluating the effects of a virtual reality-based brain-machine interface protocol in spinal cord injury, combining the BMI protocol with VR, sensory feedback (visual, auditory, tactile) and/or an exoskeleton.

Participants are monitored weekly in a total of 12 sessions of one to two hours each, moving a virtual avatar through motor imagery in VR while brain activity is recorded with EEG, aiming to characterize information transfer dynamics between brain regions and improve rehabilitation of SCI patients.

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Sources · 1

clinicaltrials.gov 2026-07-29

Neurorehabilitation Spinal Cord Injury Non-invasive BCI

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