Direct neural sensory feedback and control of a prosthetic arm

Abstract

Evidence indicates that user acceptance of modern artificial limbs by amputees would be significantly enhanced by a system that provides appropriate, graded, distally referred sensations of touch and joint movement, and that the functionality of limb prostheses would be improved by a more natural control mechanism. We have recently demonstrated that it is possible to implant electrodes within individual fascicles of peripheral nerve stumps in amputees, that stimulation through these electrodes can produce graded, discrete sensations of touch or movement referred to the amputee's phantom hand, and that recordings of motor neuron activity associated with attempted movements of the phantom limb through these electrodes can be used as graded control signals. We report here that this approach allows amputees to both judge and set grip force and joint position in an artificial arm, in the absence of visual input, thus providing a substrate for better integration of the artificial limb into the amputee's body image. We believe this to be the first demonstration of direct neural feedback from and direct neural control of an artificial arm in amputees.

On the use of wavelet denoising and spike sorting techniques to process electroneurographic signals recorded using intraneural electrodes

“…This represents a very important step in developing an ENG-based control system for limb prostheses, extending the results shown by Dhillon and Horch (2005).…”

Humans can integrate feedback of discrete events in their sensorimotor control of a robotic hand

“…Feedback for prosthetic hands has traditionally been provided in a continuous fashion and with limited success, whether at body sites normally not involved in the motor task (Mann and Reimers 1970;Chatterjee et al 2008;Cipriani et al 2008;Saunders and Vijayakumar 2011;Stepp et al 2012) or by interfacing directly to neural structures normally involved in the control (i.e., afferent nerve fibers; Dhillon and Horch 2005;Rossini et al 2010;Horch et al 2011). For instance, Saunders and Vijayakumar (2011) provided continuous vibrotactile feedback related to grip force of a robot hand in an experimental setup similar to ours but failed to demonstrate any improved performance above that observed with visual feedback alone.…”

Myoelectric forearm prostheses: State of the art from a user-centered perspective

“…The most natural way to directly close the loop between sensing and feedback would be the direct stimulation of the afferent nerves, which is being investigated in several studies [61][62][63]. To avoid the invasive character of this solution, but still provide feedback by the same modality, many researchers use extended physiological taction (EPT), in which force measured by force sensors is transmitted to the user via force applied to the skin with the same amplitude and modality [64][65][66].…”