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Artificial Redirection of Sensation From Prosthetic Fingers to the Phantom Hand Map on Transradial Amputees: Vibrotactile Versus Mechanotactile Sensory Feedback

Author

Summary, in English

This work assesses the ability of transradial amputees to discriminate multi-site tactile stimuli in sensory discrimination tasks. It compares different sensory feedback modalities using an artificial hand prosthesis in: 1) a modality matched paradigm where pressure recorded on the five fingertips of the hand was fed back as pressure stimulation on five target points on the residual limb; and 2) a modality mismatched paradigm where the pressures were transformed into mechanical vibrations and fed back. Eight transradial amputees took part in the study and were divided in two groups based on the integrity of their phantom map; group A had a complete phantom map on the residual limb whereas group B had an incomplete or nonexisting map. The ability in localizing stimuli was compared with that of 10 healthy subjects using the vibration feedback and 11 healthy subjects using the pressure feedback (in a previous study), on their forearms, in similar experiments. Results demonstrate that pressure stimulation surpassed vibrotactile stimulation in multi-site sensory feedback discrimination. Furthermore, we demonstrate that subjects with a detailed phantom map had the best discrimination performance and even surpassed healthy participants for both feedback paradigms whereas group B had the worst performance overall. Finally, we show that placement of feedback devices on a complete phantom map improves multi-site sensory feedback discrimination, independently of the feedback modality.

Publishing year

2013

Language

English

Pages

112-120

Publication/Series

IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering

Volume

21

Issue

1

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

IEEE - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.

Topic

  • Surgery

Keywords

  • Prosthetic hand
  • sensory feedback
  • transradial amputee

Status

Published

Research group

  • Hand Surgery, Malmö

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1534-4320