Active tactile exploration enabled by a brain-machine-brain interface

By Joseph E. O’Doherty, Mikhail A. Lebedev, Peter J. Ifft, K. Zhuang, S. Shokur, Hannes Bleuler, M. Nicolelis. Nature, 2011

580 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Brain–machine interfaces use neuronal activity recorded from the brain to establish direct communication with external actuators, such as prosthetic arms. It is hoped that brain–machine interfaces can be used to restore the normal sensorimotor functions of the limbs, but so far they have lacked tactile sensation. Here we report the operation of a brain–machine–brain interface (BMBI) that both controls the exploratory reaching movements of an actuator and allows signalling of artificial tactile feedback through intracortical microstimulation (ICMS) of the primary somatosensory cortex. Monkeys performed an active exploration task in which an actuator (a computer cursor or a virtual-reality arm) was moved using a BMBI that derived motor commands from neuronal ensemble activity recorded in the primary motor cortex. ICMS feedback occurred whenever the actuator touched virtual objects. Temporal patterns of ICMS encoded the artificial tactile properties of each object. Neuronal recordings and ICMS epochs were temporally multiplexed to avoid interference. Two monkeys operated this BMBI to search for and distinguish one of three visually identical objects, using the virtual-reality arm to identify the unique artificial texture associated with each. These results suggest that clinical motor neuroprostheses might benefit from the addition of ICMS feedback to generate artificial somatic perceptions associated with mechanical, robotic or even virtual prostheses.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aa021b1cf63517a570a975626f29f9b136c17e4a

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Citations in the corpus

Intracortical microstimulation of human somatosensory cortex (2016, methodology): “In addition, stimulation of area 1 has been used to instruct target selection in a brain-computer interface control task (22).”
An Integrated Brain-Machine Interface Platform With Thousands of Channels (2019, background): “Modulating neural activity will be an important part of next-generation clinical brain-machine interfaces [39], for example to provide a sense of touch or proprioception to neuroprosthetic movement control [40, 41].”
Brain-Machine Interfaces: From Basic Science to Neuroprostheses and Neurorehabilitation. (2017, methodology): “Stimulation can be applied to somatosensory cortex (368, 598, 676, 784), thalamus (182, 321, 479, 605), and peripheral sensory nerves (183, 662, 683, 791).”
High performance communication by people with paralysis using an intracortical brain-computer interface (2017, background): “…et al., 2002; Taylor et al., 2002; Carmena et al., 2003; Musallam et al., 2004; Santhanam et al., 2006; Hochberg et al., 2006; Ganguly et al., 2011; O’Doherty et al., 2011; Gilja et al., 2012; Simeral et al., 2011; Bacher et al., 2015; Nuyujukian et al., 2015; Aflalo et al., 2015; Gilja et al.,…”