Microstimulation: Principles, Techniques, and Approaches to Somatosensory Neuroprosthesis

Critical Reviews in Biomedical Engineering
Mulugeta Semework

Abstract

The power of movement of electrically charged particles has been used to alleviate an array of illnesses and help control some human body parts. Microstimulation, the electrical current-driven excitation of neural elements, is now being aimed at brain-machine interfaces (BMIs), brain-controlled external devices that improve quality of life for people such as those who have lost the ability to use their limbs. This effort is motivated by behavioral experiments that indicate a direct link between microstimulation-induced sensory experience and behavior, pointing to the possibility of optimizing and controlling the outputs of BMIs. Several laboratories have focused on using electrical stimulation to return somatosensory feedback from prosthetic limbs directly to the user's central nervous system. However, the difficulty of the problem has led to limited success thus far, and there is a need for a better understanding of the basic principles of neural microstimulation. This article provides a review of the available literature and some recent work at Downstate Medical Center and Columbia University on microstimulation of the primate and rodent somatosensory (S1) cortex and the ventral posterolateral thalamus. It is aimed at contrib...Continue Reading

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