AI Article Synopsis

  • Microstimulation of the somatosensory cortex can create artificial tactile sensations and may be used in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) to help restore sensory function after injury or illness.
  • Researchers tested how different stimulation settings, like amplitude and frequency, affected these sensations in two human subjects with spinal cord injuries.
  • They discovered that while higher amplitude and longer stimulation increased perceived intensity, frequency effects varied, leading to either stronger or weaker sensations depending on the electrode used, which could inform better BCI development.

Article Abstract

Microstimulation in the somatosensory cortex can evoke artificial tactile percepts and can be incorporated into bidirectional brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) to restore function after injury or disease. However, little is known about how stimulation parameters themselves affect perception. Here, we stimulated through microelectrode arrays implanted in the somatosensory cortex of two human participants with cervical spinal cord injury and varied the stimulus amplitude, frequency, and train duration. Increasing the amplitude and train duration increased the perceived intensity on all tested electrodes. Surprisingly, we found that increasing the frequency evoked more intense percepts on some electrodes but evoked less-intense percepts on other electrodes. These different frequency-intensity relationships were divided into three groups, which also evoked distinct percept qualities at different stimulus frequencies. Neighboring electrode sites were more likely to belong to the same group. These results support the idea that stimulation frequency directly controls tactile perception and that these different percepts may be related to the organization of somatosensory cortex, which will facilitate principled development of stimulation strategies for bidirectional BCIs.

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Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8376245PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.65128DOI Listing

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