Turns out people can hear prostheses attached to their skeletons (Medical Device & Outsourcing)
Attach prostheses directly to people’s skeletons, and they can actually hear vibrations in their implants, according to Swedish and Italian researchers.
The discovery provides a better understanding of osseoperception – the way that people with osseointegrated prostheses can “feel” mechanical stimulation of the device.
“Until now, the consensus was that the sense of touch played the primary role in osseoperception for patients with artificial limbs fixated into their skeletons,” said Max Ortiz Catalan, head of the Biomechatronics and Neurorehabilitation Laboratory at the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and supervisor of the research.
The understanding that both touch and hearing matter could provide better insights into the development of novel artificial limbs. The researchers – from the Chalmers University of Technology, Sahlgrenska University Hospital and University of Gothenburg in Sweden and Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Italy – recently published their findings in Nature Scientific Reports.
“Using 4 different psychophysical tests, we have demonstrated that even subt...
