Targeted Reinnervation - Future Research and Development

Future Research and Development

The team has now moved onto a trial with transhumeral amputees (amputation at the elbow level), with the hope that median nerve transfer in transradial amputation could potentially provide thumb control. With all previous patients being upper limb amputees, the team also hopes to move on to lower limb amputees eventually.

The nerves could also be further split to provide even more independent signals, so that more functions can be controlled simultaneously and more degrees of freedom can be gained in prosthesis control. This could also prompt the production of more sophisticated prosthetic devices with more degrees of freedom, such as the six-motor experimental prosthesis mentioned above.

Targeted reinnervation could also utilize implantable electrodes to record more localized signals from the target muscle, so that crosstalk can be further mitigated.

Much work is still to be done to translocate the sensory feedback from the reinnervated target muscle to the actual prosthesis, or to construct prostheses that are capable of providing appropriate stimuli to the reinnervated target muscle according to the external stimuli received, so that the sensory feedback of the arm comes from its native physical position.