Evaluation of Phantom Finger Sensation Evoked by Electrical Stimulation for Transradial Amputee - A Case Study.

Prostheses are very necessary for limb amputees to restore their lost motor functions. However, most of the commercially available prostheses are lack of intuitive sensory feedback, which would limit the prosthetic control performance. Electrical stimulation is supposed to induce sensory feedback for limb amputees, and some invasive methods have been reported but limited due to the second surgery and possible biological incompatibility in long-term use. Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation (TENS) is considered as a non-invasive method to reestablish neural feedback for limb amputees, which might be more practical in clinic application. In this paper, we proposed an approach based on electroencephalogram (EEG) to study the relationship between the TENS parameters and the evoked somatosensory information for limb amputees. The experimental results demonstrated that different somatosensory information evoked by TENS at different body positions on a transradial amputee could be distinguished by the Event-Related Potential (ERP) characteristics such as frequency range, brain electrical activity mapping, latency, and shape feature of ERP segments. In addition, the high correlation of ERP curves obtained by the repeated experiments could approve the effectiveness and stability of our proposed method. This work might support the future research on non-invasive sensory neural feedback for limb amputees.