Le professeur Sliman Bensmaia donnera le 28 avril 2014 une conférence intitulée «Restoring the sense of touch with a prosthetic hand through a brain interface.»
Cet événement (affiche 
) est organisé en collaboration avec l'Ecole Doctorale des Neurosciences et se déroulera dans l'auditoire MAISIN (Avenue Emmmanuel Mounier, 51) à 18h sur le campus de Louvain-en-Woluwé (UCL). Il sera suivi d'un drink.
Abstract : Our ability to manipulate objects dexterously relies fundamentally on sensory signals originating from the hand. To restore motor function with upper-limb neuroprostheses requires that somatosensory feedback be provided to the tetraplegic patient or amputee. Given the complexity of state-of-the-art prosthetic limbs, and thus the huge state-space they can traverse, it is desirable to minimize the need of the patient to learn associations between events impinging upon the limb and arbitrary sensations. With this in mind, we have developed approaches to intuitively convey three critical types of information for object manipulation – information about contact location, pressure, and timing – through intracortical microstimulation (ICMS) of primary somatosensory cortex (S1). In experiments with non-human primates, we show that we can elicit percepts that are projected to a localized patch of skin and that track the pressure exerted on the skin. In a real-time application, we demonstrate that animals can perform a tactile discrimination task equally well whether mechanical stimuli are delivered to their native fingers or to a prosthetic one. Finally, we propose that the timing of contact events can be signaled through phasic ICMS at the onset and offset of object contact that mimics the ubiquitous on and off responses observed in S1 to complement slowly-varying pressure-related feedback. We anticipate that the proposed biomimetic feedback will considerably increase the dexterity and embodiment of upper-limb neuroprostheses and will constitute an important step in restoring touch to individuals who have lost it.