(Some) Published Work
May 2019
The sense of touch is critical for skillful hand control, but is largely missing for people who use prosthetic devices. Instead, prosthesis users rely heavily on visual feedback, even though state transitions that are necessary to skillfully interact with objects, such as object contact, are relayed more precisely through tactile feedback. Here we show that restoring tactile sensory feedback, through intracortical microstimulation of the somatosensory cortex, enables a person with a bidirectional intracortical brain-computer interface to improve their performance on functional object transport tasks completed with a neurally-controlled prosthetic limb.
October 2016
Intracortical microstimulation of the somatosensory cortex offers the potential for creating a sensory neuroprosthesis to restore tactile sensation. Whereas animal studies have suggested that both cutaneous and proprioceptive percepts can be evoked using this approach, the perceptual quality of the stimuli cannot be measured in these experiments. We show that microstimulation within the hand area of the somatosensory cortex of a person with long-term spinal cord injury evokes tactile sensations perceived as originating from locations on the hand and that cortical stimulation sites are organized according to expected somatotopic principles. Many of these percepts exhibit naturalistic characteristics (including feelings of pressure), can be evoked at low stimulation amplitudes, and remain stable for months.
Dexterous object manipulation requires cutaneous sensory feedback, and in its absence, even simple grasping tasks appear clumsy and slow. In prosthetic limbs controlled through intracortical brain-computer interfaces (iBCIs), restoring this somatosensory feedback could be an important step to improving function as vision provides only impoverished cues during object interactions. Intracortical microstimulation (ICMS) of primary somatosensory cortex (S1) is a potential method to restore this sensory feedback, particularly in people who cannot benefit from stimulation of the peripheral nervous system.
2017
...but wait, there's more! See my CV for conference presentations and middle author publications.