Multimodal Sensory Feedback for Virtual Proprioception in Powered Upper-Limb Prostheses

This paper demonstrates the use of mechanotactile feedback to provide humans with virtual proprioception of their prosthetic devices. Traditional prostheses provide little or no sensory feedback, requiring the user to visually inspect many tasks performed with device. Virtual proprioception can allow humans to incorporate the kinematic and kinetic states of an external device into their body image, leading to greater physical intuition of device activity, lower cognitive loading, more reliable usage models, and more dexterous manipulation. Vibrotactile stimuli are used the display sensory information about the grasp aperture, grasp force, and object surface texture through a powered split-hook prosthesis. Experimental evaluation of manipulation with mechanotactile-based virtual proprioception strong capability to accurately determine object properties (85.4% success) without need for visual inspection.