Presentation description

The long-term goal of this research is to provide sensory feedback to hand amputee patients to improve the dexterity and functionality of hand prostheses. An estimated 41,000 people within the U.S. and 2 million people worldwide are currently living with a partial/full hand amputation. Losing a hand causes you to lose a certain degree of autonomy and decreases your quality of life, as it causes dependence on others for certain tasks that were previously able to be dealt with independently before, significantly impacting work, leisure, and hobby activities. Our goal for this specific project is to build a wearable, noninvasive wrist stimulation device that accurately evokes sensation on individual fingers and can provide sensory feedback to hand prosthesis users. We will build a watch-like stimulation device that has multiple electrodes that will enable us to target individual nerve branches in the wrist, thus allowing us to recreate accurate somatosensory responses that are critical for dexterous grasping. The wearable stimulator will allow for more precise and informative sensory feedback about grasping, which will likely lead to better prosthetic control and more functional prostheses.