NEURAL ENGINEERING SEMINAR
NORD 356
Speaker: Rohit Bose - Postdoctoral Candidate
Abstract: The number of people with limb loss is rising rapidly and is projected to reach 3.6 million in 2050. Current prosthetic devices allow for improved mobility, but do not provide any sensory feedback to the user. This lack of sensory feedback leads to poor adoption of prostheses, an increased risk of falls, and abnormal gait patterns. Additionally, most people with limb amputations experience chronic phantom limb pain, and the loss of sensory feedback is believed to be one of the causes of this pain.
At the Rehab Neural Engineering Labs, we work to restore the lost sensation from the missing limb in people with lower-limb amputation by electrically stimulating the sensory nerves in the lumbar spinal cord. Our goal is to evoke stable sensations that emanate from the missing limb and modulate those sensations based on the pressure signals recorded from the sole of the prosthetic foot. This talk will demonstrate that spinal cord stimulation can evoke sensations in the missing limb, reduce phantom limb pain, and improve function for people with lower-limb amputation.
Speaker Bio: Rohit Bose is pursuing his Ph.D. in the Rehab Neural Engineering Labs at the University of Pittsburgh. Prior to his Ph.D., he worked at the N.1 Institute of Health (previously SINAPSE) at the National University of Singapore. His research interests include neuroprosthetics, spinal cord stimulation, and multisensory integration. He began working on non-invasive sensory feedback for people with upper-limb amputation using TENS. At RNEL, his primary focus is to explore minimally invasive technologies to restore sensation. He has authored more than 20 peer-reviewed manuscripts with >700 citations.