To effortlessly complete an intentional movement, the brain needs feedback from the body regarding the movement’s progress. This largely non-conscious kinesthetic sense helps the brain to learn relationships between motor commands and outcomes to correct movement errors. Prosthetic systems for restoring function have predominantly focused on controlling motorized joint movement. Without the kinesthetic sense, however, these devices do not become intuitively controllable. Here we report a method for endowing human amputees with a kinesthetic perception of dexterous robotic hands. Vibrating the muscles used for prosthetic control via a neural-machine interface produced the illusory perception of complex grip movements. Within minutes, three amputees integrated this kinesthetic feedback and improved movement control. Combining intent, kinesthesia, and vision instilled participants with a sense of agency over the robotic movements. This feedback approach for closed-loop control opens a pathway to seamless integration of minds and machines.

Based on these findings, the high-density cuff technology is suitable for restoring natural sensation to lower-limb amputees and could be utilized in developing a neuroprosthesis with natural sensory feedback. The overlap in reported locations between proximal and distal cuffs indicates that our approach might be applicable to transfemoral amputees where distal muscles and branches of sciatic nerve are not available.

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Frontiers in Neuroscience | www.frontiersin.org February 2020 | Volume 14 | Article 120 Schofield et al.Long-Term Sensory-Motor-Integrated Prosthetic Arm Use a spectrum of performance changes following long-term use. Furthermore, after the take-home period, participants more appropriately integrated their prostheses into their body images and psychophysical tests provided strong evidence that neural and cortical adaptation occurred.