Stimulus interaction in transcutaneous electrical stimulation

This chapter gives an overview of how our understanding of the nervous system and human motor control has shaped strategies to deliver functional sensory feedback for prosthetic control. We show how event-related feedback takes into account the naturally occurring spiking patterns of afferent sensory fibres. Recent studies employing this method show that it can lead to a range of benefits. However, it is not yet clear if the chosen stimulation paradigms are optimal in the context of human motor control, and the physiology of sensory feedback. At the end of the chapter, we focus on a study investigating how changing temporal patterns between identical stimuli can change their perception, thereby increasing the amount of information we can provide for prosthetic users. The results also show that stimulus interaction occurs on different time scales due to both neural behaviour and human perception limitations.