Hand loss is a highly disabling event that markedly affects the quality of life. To achieve a close to natural replacement for the lost hand, the user should be provided with the rich sensations that we naturally perceive when grasping or manipulating an object. Ideal bidirectional hand prostheses should involve both a reliable decoding of the user's intentions and the delivery of nearly "natural" sensory feedback through remnant afferent pathways, simultaneously and in real time. However, current hand prostheses fail to achieve these requirements, particularly because they lack any sensory feedback. We show that by stimulating the median and ulnar nerve fascicles using transversal multichannel intrafascicular electrodes, according to the information provided by the artificial sensors from a hand prosthesis, physiologically appropriate (near-natural) sensory information can be provided to an amputee during the real-time decoding of different grasping tasks to control a dexterous hand prosthesis. This feedback enabled the participant to effectively modulate the grasping force of the prosthesis with no visual or auditory feedback. Three different force levels were distinguished and consistently used by the subject. The results also demonstrate that a high complexity of perception can be obtained, allowing the subject to identify the stiffness and shape of three different objects by exploiting different characteristics of the elicited sensations. This approach could improve the efficacy and "life-like" quality of hand prostheses, resulting in a keystone strategy for the near-natural replacement of missing hands.

The loss of one hand can significantly affect the level of autonomy and the capability of performing daily living, working and social activities. The current prosthetic solutions contribute in a poor way to overcome these problems due to limitations in the interfaces adopted for controlling the prosthesis and to the lack of force or tactile feedback, thus limiting hand grasp capabilities. This paper presents a literature review on needs analysis of upper limb prosthesis users, and points out the main critical aspects of the current prosthetic solutions, in terms of users satisfaction and activities of daily living they would like to perform with the prosthetic device. The ultimate goal is to provide design inputs in the prosthetic field and, contemporary, increase user satisfaction rates and reduce device abandonment. A list of requirements for upper limb prostheses is proposed, grounded on the performed analysis on user needs. It wants to (i) provide guidelines for improving the level of acceptability and usefulness of the prosthesis, by accounting for hand functional and technical aspects; (ii) propose a control architecture of PNS-based prosthetic systems able to satisfy the analyzed user wishes; (iii) provide hints for improving the quality of the methods (e.g., questionnaires) adopted for understanding the user satisfaction with their prostheses.

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Restoration of touch after hand amputation is a desirable feature of ideal prostheses. Here, we show that texture discrimination can be artificially provided in human subjects by implementing a neuromorphic real-time mechano-neuro-transduction (MNT), which emulates to some extent the firing dynamics of SA1 cutaneous afferents. The MNT process was used to modulate the temporal pattern of electrical spikes delivered to the human median nerve via percutaneous microstimulation in four intact subjects and via implanted intrafascicular stimulation in one transradial amputee. Both approaches allowed the subjects to reliably discriminate spatial coarseness of surfaces as confirmed also by a hybrid neural model of the median nerve. Moreover, MNT-evoked EEG activity showed physiologically plausible responses that were superimposable in time and topography to the ones elicited by a natural mechanical tactile stimulation. These findings can open up novel opportunities for sensory restoration in the next generation of neuro-prosthetic hands.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.09148.001

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Despite previous studies on the restoration of tactile sensation on the fingers and the hand, there are no examples of use of the routed sensory information to finely control the prosthesis hand in complex grasp and manipulation tasks. Here it is shown that force and slippage sensations can be elicited in an amputee subject by means of biologically-inspired slippage detection and encoding algorithms, supported by a stick-slip model of the performed grasp. A combination of cuff and intraneural electrodes was implanted for eleven weeks in a young woman with hand amputation, and was shown to provide close-to-natural force and slippage sensations, paramount for significantly improving the subject’s manipulative skills with the prosthesis. Evidence is provided about the improvement of the subject’s grasping and manipulation capabilities over time, thanks to neural feedback. The elicited tactile sensations enabled the successful fulfillment of fine grasp and manipulation tasks with increasing complexity. Grasp performance was quantitatively assessed by means of instrumented objects and a purposely developed metrics. Closed-loop control capabilities enabled by the neural feedback were compared to those achieved without feedback. Further, the work investigates whether the described amelioration of motor performance in dexterous tasks had as central neurophysiological correlates changes in motor cortex plasticity and whether such changes were of purely motor origin, or else the effect of a strong and persistent drive of the sensory feedback.

Because wrist rotation dynamics are dominated by stiffness (Charles SK, Hogan N. J Biomech 44: 614 -621, 2011), understanding how humans plan and execute coordinated wrist rotations requires knowledge of the stiffness characteristics of the wrist joint. In the past, the passive stiffness of the wrist joint has been measured in 1 degree of freedom (DOF). Although these 1-DOF measurements inform us of the dynamics the neuromuscular system must overcome to rotate the wrist in pure flexion-extension (FE) or pure radial-ulnar deviation (RUD), the wrist rarely rotates in pure FE or RUD. Instead, understanding natural wrist rotations requires knowledge of wrist stiffness in combinations of FE and RUD. The purpose of this report is to present measurements of passive wrist stiffness throughout the space spanned by FE and RUD. Using a rehabilitation robot designed for the wrist and forearm, we measured the passive stiffness of the wrist joint in 10 subjects in FE, RUD, and combinations. For comparison, we measured the passive stiffness of the forearm (in pronation-supination), as well. Our measurements in pure FE and RUD agreed well with previous 1-DOF measurements. We have linearized the 2-DOF stiffness measurements and present them in the form of stiffness ellipses and as stiffness matrices useful for modeling wrist rotation dynamics. We found that passive wrist stiffness was anisotropic, with greater stiffness in RUD than in FE. We also found that passive wrist stiffness did not align with the anatomical axes of the wrist; the major and minor axes of the stiffness ellipse were rotated with respect to the FE and RUD axes by ϳ20°. The direction of least stiffness was between ulnar flexion and radial extension, a direction used in many natural movements (known as the "dart-thrower's motion"), suggesting that the nervous system may take advantage of the direction of least stiffness for common wrist rotations. wrist stiffness; muscle tone; neuromuscular; motor control; spasticity GRACEFUL MOVEMENT REQUIRES that the neuromuscular system compensate for unwanted dynamics of the body. For example, it is well known that simple reaching movements require complex torques to compensate for the coupled inertial dynamics of the arm (Hollerbach and Flash 1982). Decades of research have shown that the compensation of unwanted limb dynamics is accomplished through a combination of feedback control (through muscles, reflex loops, and adaptation) and predictive control, and much effort has focused specifically on how the brain compensates for the coupled inertial dynamics of the arm during reaching movements (Bastian et al. 1996;Bastian 2006).Recent work has shown that the dynamics of wrist rotations are quite different from reaching movements: wrist rotations are dominated by stiffness, not inertia (Charles and Hogan 2011), suggesting that a major part of wrist control involves compensating for the stiffness of the wrist joint. Several studies have measured wrist stiffness in flexion and/or extension (Axelson and Hagbarth 2001;Cornu et a...

The efficacy of standard rehabilitative therapy for improving upper limb functions after stroke is limited; thus, alternative strategies are needed. Vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) paired with rehabilitation is a promising approach, but the invasiveness of this technique limits its clinical application. Recently, a noninvasive method to stimulate vagus nerve has been developed. The aim of the present study was to explore whether noninvasive VNS combined with robotic rehabilitation can enhance upper limb functionality in chronic stroke. Safety and efficacy of this combination have been assessed within a proof-of-principle, double-blind, semirandomized, sham-controlled trial. Fourteen patients with either ischemic or haemorrhagic chronic stroke were randomized to robot-assisted therapy associated with real or sham VNS, delivered for 10 working days. Efficacy was evaluated by change in upper extremity Fugl–Meyer score. After intervention, there were no adverse events and Fugl–Meyer scores were significantly better in the real group compared to the sham group. Our pilot study confirms that VNS is feasible in stroke patients and can produce a slight clinical improvement in association to robotic rehabilitation. Compared to traditional stimulation, noninvasive VNS seems to be safer and more tolerable. Further studies are needed to confirm the efficacy of this innovative approach.