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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Sigrid Dupan, Dr Emma Brunton, Professor Kianoush Nazarpour
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Transcutaneous electrical stimulation is a promising technique for providing prosthetic hand users with information about sensory events. However, questions remain over how to design the stimulation paradigms to provide users the best opportunity to discriminate these events. Here, we investigate if the refractory period influences how the amplitude of the applied stimulus is perceived. Twenty participants completed a two-alternative forced choice experiment. We delivered two stimuli spaced between 250 ms to 450 ms apart (inter-stimulus-interval, isi). The participants reported which stimulus they perceived as strongest. Each stimulus consisted of either a single or paired pulse delivered transcutaneously. The inter-pulse interval (ipi) for the paired pulse stimuli varied between 6 and 10 ms. We found paired pulses with an ipi of 6 ms were perceived stronger than a single pulse less often than paired pulses with an ipi of 8 ms (p = 0.001) or 10 ms (p < 0.0001). Additionally, we found when the isi was 250 ms, participants were less likely to identify the paired pulse as strongest, than when the isi was 350 or 450 ms. This study emphasizes the importance of basing stimulation paradigms on the underlying neural physiology. The results indicate there is an upper limit to the commonly accepted notion that higher stimulation frequencies lead to stronger perception. If frequency is to be used to encode sensory events, then the results suggest stimulus paradigms should be designed using frequencies below 125 Hz.
Author(s): Dupan S, McNeill Z, Sarda E, Brunton E, Nazarpour K
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering
Year: 2022
Pages: Epub ahead of print
Online publication date: 10/03/2022
Acceptance date: 02/04/2018
Date deposited: 28/03/2022
ISSN (print): 1534-4320
ISSN (electronic): 1558-0210
Publisher: IEEE
URL: https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSRE.2022.3158067
DOI: 10.1109/TNSRE.2022.3158067
PubMed id: 35271444
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