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Topic Overview:
By 2050, more than 3.6 million people in the United States will be living with limb loss. Recent advances in design and actuation have led to dramatic improvements in prosthetic limbs. However, these devices cannot provide direct sensory feedback and require users to infer information about limb state from pressure on the residual limb. For people with upper-limb amputation, lack of sensory feedback results in poor adoption of prostheses, low dexterity, and the requirement of near-constant visual attention when using the device. For people with lower-limb amputation, reduced sensory feedback makes activities like stair climbing and walking on uneven terrain difficult and dangerous with a prosthetic limb. Further, approximately 85% of people with limb amputations experience phantom limb pain, and lack of sensory feedback is believed to be one of the primary causes of that pain.

A primary goal of Fisher’s lab is to restore sensory feedback from prosthetic limbs in people with amputation. By electrically stimulating sensory neurons in the spinal cord, the goal is to evoke sensations that appear to emanate from the missing limb and to modulate the intensity of those sensations based on signals (e.g., fingertip pressure) recorded from the prosthesis. Spinal cord stimulation is currently used in more than 50,000 people each year to treat chronic pain. Using the same devices and similar implantation techniques, Fisher’s team has demonstrated that stimulation of the cervical and lumbar spinal cord can restore sensation in people with upper- and lower-limb amputation, improve control of prosthetic limbs and reduce phantom limb pain. Fisher will present results from these studies and describe the planned path to widespread clinical dissemination of technologies to restore sensation and improve function after limb amputation.