Fig. 1.

Schematic diagram of a typical data flow in a neuro-motor prosthetic application. Ensemble neural recordings are first amplified and filtered prior to telemetry transmission to the outside world. Three data processing paths are considered. (1) Wired systems (top): information is extracted through the cascade of spike detection and sorting followed by rate estimation with a massive computational power [2]. (2) Wireless systems (middle): Telemetry bandwidth is reduced by moving the spike detection block inside the implantable device [12], [13]. (3) Proposed system (bottom): the spike detection, sorting and rate estimation blocks are replaced with one “compressed sensing” block that permits adaptive firing rate estimation in real time for instantaneous decoding to take place.