The term “phantom limb” is often used to describe the subtle sensation of something being felt but not seen, but few people realize how disorienting the syndrome can be.
For more than half of all amputees, phantom limbs can be an unusual and even painful experience, feeling as if their missing limb is much smaller than it actually was. This can cause additional problems when wearing the prosthesis. Instead of feeling like their limb has been lengthened by the prosthesis, they feel like the device just doesn’t match their phantom limb.
New research from the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland could help some amputees better connect what they see with what they feel. In a paper published recently in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry, researchers show how the brain of an amputee can be tricked into thinking that a prosthetic arm is merging with their body.
Amputees feel as if their prosthetic limb belongs to their own body
“In this study, we show that amputees can actually be convinced that the prosthetic arm belongs to their own body,” Giulio Rognini, senior scientist at EPFL and first author of the study, told Digital Trends. “We do this by going beyond the ‘seeing is believing’ idiom, based on established research on how the brain recognizes what belongs to its own body. Instead of using only the sense of sight, we used a combination of two senses — sight and touch.”
The Rognini system works by stimulating a nerve in the subject’s stump, which causes a sense of touch on the index finger of the phantom limb. At the same time, the index finger is illuminated on the prosthetic device, shown to the participant through a virtual reality headset. This combination of sight and tactile sensation seems to condense the mind, returning the perception of the phantom limb to the prosthesis.
In studies conducted on amputees, the sensation of stretching their phantom limbs lasted up to 10 minutes after the simulation ended, according to the researchers. The participants said after the study that they felt as if the limb had extended into the prosthetic device. Going forward, they want to test whether these effects can be made permanent and whether this system can be used to alleviate or eliminate the pain that occurs in phantom limbs.
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Source: newstars.edu.vn