Biomimetic sensory feedback

A stimulation strategy that shapes the ICMS train to mimic the temporal firing pattern of the natural mechanoreceptive afferents that a touch would normally recruit, rather than making the stimulus amplitude a simple linear function of a contact variable. Because rapidly-adapting afferents fire transiently at contact onset and offset while slowly-adapting afferents sustain during hold, biomimetic encoding injects amplitude transients at contact events and lower tonic drive in between.

Empirically this transient-emphasizing scheme improves perception of contact timing and object interaction, and participants often report it feels more natural or more useful than constant intensity coding, even when the two deliver similar total charge. It is a leading answer to the question of what an artificial afferent signal should look like.