Decoding Information From Neural Signals Recorded Using Intraneural Electrodes: Toward the Development of a Neurocontrolled Hand Prosthesis

Abstract

Abstract-The possibility of controlling dexterous hand prostheses by using a direct connection with the nervous system is particularly interesting for the significant improvement of the quality of life of patients, which can derive from this achievement. Among the various approaches, peripheral nerve based intra fascicular electrodes are excellent neural interface candidates, representing an excellent compromise between high selectivity and relatively low invasiveness. Moreover, this approach has undergone preliminary testing in human volunteers and has shown promises.In this manuscript, we investigated whether the use of intrafascicular electrodes can be used to decode multiple sensory and motor information channels with the aim to develop a finite state algorithm that may be employed to control neuroprostheses and neuro-controlled hand prostheses. The results achieved both in animal and human experiments show that the combination of multiple sites recordings and advanced signal processing techniques (such as wavelet denoising and spike sorting algorithms) can be used to identify both sensory stimuli (in animal models) and motor commands (in a human volunteer). These findings have interesting implications, which should be investigated in future experiments.

Interfacing with the nervous system: a review of current bioelectric technologies

“…Notably, a polymer-based, thin-film longitudinal intrafascicular electrode (tfLIFE/polyLIFE) demonstrated no deleterious effects on nerve fiber count, diameter, or myelin thickness while providing higher recording selectivity than standard metal LIFE following 6 months of implantation in rabbit sciatic nerves [65]. LIFE has also been used to detect neural impulses from the median and ulnar nerves in an amputee to manipulate a robotic hand by the human patient [85,122]. Transverse intrafascicular multi-channel electrodes (TIMEs) provide superior spatial selectivity than LIFE by enabling contact beyond one fascicle (Fig.…”

Metrological issues concerning low cost EMG-controlled prosthetic hand

“…The constraints described above have led the authors to (i) discard the many high-performance solutions already presented in the literature [10] and (ii) find an innovative solution that would met the best tradeoff between performance and affordability. Moreover, the use of feedback transducers has been considered not feasible, because of their cost and impact on the prosthesis reliability [11].…”

A novel framework for feature extraction in multi-sensor action potential sorting

“…In addition, these signals invariably contain various noise components, such as electrode (thermal) noise, biological noise (activity of distant neurons), and ionic channel noise (Benitez and Nenadic, 2008). The process of separating out the activity of individual neurons from this so-called multi-unit activity measurements is often referred to as AP sorting or spike sorting (Fee et al, 1996;Abeles and Goldstein, 1997;Lewicki, 1998;Gibson et al, 2012;Micera et al, 2010).…”