Abstract
This manuscript reviews historical and recent studies that focus on supplementary sensory feedback for use in upper limb prostheses. It shows that the inability of many studies to speak to the issue of meaningful performance improvements in real-life scenarios is caused by the complexity of the interactions of supplementary sensory feedback with other types of feedback along with other portions of the motor control process. To do this, the present manuscript frames the question of supplementary feedback from the perspective of computational motor control, providing a brief review of the main advances in that field over the last 20 years. It then separates the studies on the closed-loop prosthesis control into distinct categories, which are defined by relating the impact of feedback to the relevant components of the motor control framework, and reviews the work that has been done over the last 50+ years in each of those categories. It ends with a discussion of the studies, along with suggestions for experimental construction and connections with other areas of research, such as machine learning.
Highlights
Anyone who has tried to light a match with cold, numb fingers can appreciate the role that somatosensory feedback plays in accomplishing tasks
Supplementary feedback has been investigated for use in prostheses for more than 50 years, but has typically failed to make a clinical impact due to the availability of incidental feedback, the choice of feedback provided, and the inherent noise in many of the sensory feedback information sources
Recent studies have started to make a surge in the amount of impactful work in this area. All these works have been designed so that the supplementary feedback makes an impact after integration with the other components of the motor control loop
Summary
Anyone who has tried to light a match with cold, numb fingers can appreciate the role that somatosensory feedback plays in accomplishing tasks. Sensory feedback is important, it is only one piece of a complicated story. Small delicate tasks may be influenced by sensory deficits in ways that larger, gross motions would not. It is possible that one would learn to compensate for numb fingers over time (say after a surgically induced numbing) such that it was only a minor inconvenience, relying on training, experience, and alternative sensory cues (e.g., visual observation). Sensory feedback is important, but it is part of a complicated, multifaceted system that makes it difficult to assess the true value and limitations of individual sensory percepts when used to supplement systems with sensory deficits such as prostheses
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