Between 2014 and 2018, as I was pursuing my PhD in neural engineering, I studied novel techniques for improving the quality and type of sensory feedback we can deliver to upper-limb amputees. My research was carried out across several clinical sites in Europe and was supported by various European projects, including EPIONE and NEBIAS.
My research focused on three major topics related to sensory feedback:
- Using non-invasive electrical stimulation to induce sensations of touch referred to the phantom hand. In a 2017 Scientific Reports article, I showed how this approach could reproduce many of the exciting functional benefits demonstrated with more invasive strategies, but without implants.
- Providing multimodal sensory feedback, where the aim is to restore more than just one type of sensation. In my research, I focused on restoring proprioceptive information (about the position of the fingers) alongside tactile information. I demonstrated that both streams of information were used simultaneously to infer object properties during grasping, such as the size and stiffness of a cylinder. My results were published in Science Robotics, and an open-access (preprint) version is available here.
- Improving the quality of the restored tactile sensations. In a Neuron paper, my colleagues and I demonstrated that by using biomimicry to deliver higher-fidelity tactile impulses into the nerves, we could induce artificial touch sensations which felt more natural than with classical approaches. The cover I designed was used for the Neuron issue in which our work appeared (pictured on the left).
If you want to know more about this research, my PhD thesis contains in-depth information about my work. Additionally, if you reach out, I would be happy to discuss it.
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