PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Natalija Katic
AU  - Josep-Maria Balaguer
AU  - Oleg Gorskii
AU  - Natalia Pavlova
AU  - Dzhina Karalogly
AU  - Dmitry Bulgin
AU  - Sergei Orlov
AU  - Pavel Musienko
AU  - Stanisa Raspopovic
AU  - Marco Capogrosso
TI  - Disruption of Proprioceptive Information During Electrical Stimulation of the Cutaneous Afferents
AID  - 10.1101/2021.11.19.469209
DP  - 2021 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2021.11.19.469209
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/11/20/2021.11.19.469209.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/11/20/2021.11.19.469209.full
AB  - Restoration of proprioception with neurotechnology is critical to improve effectiveness of robotic neuro-prostheses. Unfortunately, after initial enthusiasm clinical results showed that unlike touch, proprioception could not be reliably induced. Here we show that concurrent activation of multiple sensory modalities may trigger unwanted sensory regulation mechanisms that disrupt proprioception. We recorded intra-spinal neural activity induced by stimulation of proprioceptive afferents from the radial nerve in three monkeys. Then, we superimposed stimulation of the radial nerve cutaneous branch and quantified its impact on spinal neural activity via population analysis. Proprioceptive pulses produced robust neural trajectories in the neural manifold that were disrupted by concurrent stimulation of cutaneous afferents. This disruption correlated with a reduction of afferent volleys and multi-unit activity both in the spinal cord and somatosensory cortex. Our results suggest that limited specificity not only impacts localization of artificial percepts, but also their nature to an extent that was never considered.Competing Interest StatementMC and SR hold patents in relation to peripheral nerve stimulation. SR is the founder of SensArs, a company developing neural interfaces for the peripheral nervous system.