Neural prosthesis for motor function restoration in upper limb extremity

Restoration of motor function in cases of peripheral nerve injury is a challenging problem. Although peripheral nerves do regenerate, the time required for peripheral nerves to regenerate often causes atrophy to occur in the muscles before they can be re-innervated. This paper presents a solution through proximal recording of nerve signals and distal muscle stimulation. A fully implantable hardware architecture is described that can be operated by means of inductive power and MICS band data transmission schemes. Preliminary experiments and validation studies are reported with non-human primates based on recordings in the median nerve, stimulation of hand muscles, and task decoding and classification. This approach shows promise in creating a neural prosthesis capable of restoring hand movements in patients with upper limb peripheral nerve injuries.

[1]  Nitish V. Thakor,et al.  A 24 Vpp compliant biphasic stimulator for inductively powered animal behavior studies , 2013, 2013 35th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC).

[2]  Luca Citi,et al.  Restoring Natural Sensory Feedback in Real-Time Bidirectional Hand Prostheses , 2014, Science Translational Medicine.

[3]  Luca Citi,et al.  On the use of wavelet denoising and spike sorting techniques to process electroneurographic signals recorded using intraneural electrodes , 2008, Journal of Neuroscience Methods.

[4]  Nitish V. Thakor,et al.  Flexible Charge Balanced Stimulator With 5.6 fC Accuracy for 140 nC Injections , 2013, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems.

[5]  Ronald Deumens,et al.  Repairing injured peripheral nerves: Bridging the gap , 2010, Progress in Neurobiology.

[6]  Silvestro Micera,et al.  On the identification of sensory information from mixed nerves by using single-channel cuff electrodes , 2009, Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation.

[7]  Dim-Lee Kwong,et al.  Development of silicon electrode enhanced by carbon nanotube and gold nanoparticle composites on silicon neural probe fabricated with complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor process , 2014 .

[8]  Yong Ping Xu,et al.  A Compact, Low Input Capacitance Neural Recording Amplifier , 2013, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems.

[9]  Shih-Cheng Yen,et al.  A Bionic Neural Link for peripheral nerve repair , 2012, 2012 Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society.

[10]  Nitish V. Thakor,et al.  Correlation between muscular and nerve signals responsible for hand grasping in non-human primates , 2014, 2014 36th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society.