Restoration of somatosensory perception via electrical stimulation of peripheral nerves

Sensory impairment hinders a person's ability to interact with their environment, and thus reduces their quality of life. In the case of impaired somatosensory perception, visual input can only provide indirect information at non-negligible cognitive cost. Therefore, restoration of natural somatosensory perception via artificial means has led to the exploration of different biological targets (Weber et al., 2012). Stimulation of the somatosensory cortex (Bensmaia, 2015), dorsal root ganglia (Weber et al., 2011), and peripheral nerves (Pasluosta et al., 2018) can produce intuitive and near-natural tactile and proprioceptive sensations, although proprioception has been studied to a lesser extent than touch (Weber et al., 2012).

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