Electronic skin and electrocutaneous stimulation to restore the sense of touch in hand prosthetics

Electronic skin can be integrated into a prosthetic device to endow the prosthesis with artificial cutaneous sensing, thereby partially restoring the sensory information lost due to an amputation. Non-invasive cutaneous electrostimulation transmits the tactile information sensed by the electronic skin on the prosthetic hand to the human brain, through the amputee's afferent nervous system. In this paper, our current benchtop prototype of a distributed sensing-stimulation system is presented, together with the envisaged high-fidelity solution which will be integrated into a real prosthetic hand. © 2017 IEEE.