Tessellation Of Artificial Touch Via Microstimulation Of Human Somatosensory Cortex.

When we interact with objects, signals from the hand convey information about the objects and our interactions with them. A basic feature of these interactions, the locations of contacts between the hand and object, is often only available via the sense of touch. Information about locations of contact between a brain-controlled bionic hand and an object can in principle be signaled via intracortical microstimulation (ICMS) of somatosensory cortex (S1), which evokes touch sensations that are localized to a specific patch of skin. To provide intuitive location information, tactile sensors on the robotic hand drive ICMS through electrodes that evoke sensations at skin locations matching sensor locations. This approach requires that ICMS-evoked sensations be focal, stable, and distributed over the hand. To systematically investigate the localization of ICMS-evoked sensations, we analyzed the projected fields (PFs) of ICMS-evoked sensations - their spatial extent - from reports obtained over multiple years from three participants implanted with micro-electrode arrays in S1. First, we found that PFs vary widely in their size, are highly stable, and are distributed over large swaths of each participant's hand. Second, PFs increase in size as the amplitude and frequency of ICMS increases. Third, leveraging participants with residual sensation, we found that PF locations match the locations of the receptive fields (RFs) of the neurons near the stimulating electrode. Furthermore, PFs tended to be subsumed by the corresponding RFs. Fourth, multi-channel stimulation yielded a PF that reflected an approximately additive combination of the PFs of the component channels. By stimulating through electrodes with largely overlapping PFs, then, we could evoke more focal sensations, experienced primarily at the intersection of the component PFs. To assess the functional consequence of this phenomenon, we implemented multi-channel ICMS-based feedback in a bionic hand and demonstrated that the resulting sensations are more localizable than are those evoked via single-channel ICMS.