Artificial proprioception

The restoration of a sense of limb position and movement (kinesthesia) via stimulation, as distinct from cutaneous touch. Proprioception is harder to write than touch because it arises from muscle spindles, Golgi tendon organs and joint receptors whose population codes for posture and motion are distributed and continuously varying, rather than tied to a discrete skin location.

ICMS of proprioceptive cortex, or of area 2 which integrates deep and cutaneous inputs, can evoke movement- or position-related percepts, and animal work shows such signals can guide reaching. Reliable, graded, natural kinesthesia in humans nonetheless remains an open problem; in practice artificial proprioception is often approximated by cutaneous cues or by vision, which the user must consciously interpret rather than feel directly.