Peripheral nerve stimulation for tactile feedback and phantom limb pain suppression

Despite the latest advances in the development of bionic prosthesis, they are still felt unnatural to upper-limb amputees. The reasons for that is the lack of sensory feedback and phantom limb pain (PLP) that affects quality of life in 80-85% of amputees. In this clinical study, we employed peripheral nerve stimulation (PNS) as a solution for both of these problems. Invasive neural implants allowed us to modulate the natural tactile sensations in the phantom hands of two patients. Both of them were able to perform object discrimination tasks using the sensory feedback from the stimulation. One of the patients experienced full recovery from pain while stimulation was turned on; the other one felt 70% suppression of PLP.