Abstract
The peripheral nerves of an amputee's residual limb still carry the information required to provide the robust, natural control signals needed to command a dexterous prosthetic limb. However, these signals are mixed in the volume conductor of the body and extracting them is an unmet challenge. A beamforming algorithm was used to leverage the spatial separation of the fascicular sources, recovering mixed pseudo-spontaneous signals with normalized mean squared error of 0.14 ± 0.10 (n = 12) in an animal model. The method was also applied to a human femoral nerve model using computer simulations and recovered all five fascicular-group signals simultaneously with R2 = 0.7 ± 0.2 at a signal-to-noise ratio of 0 dB. This technique accurately separated peripheral neural signals, potentially providing the voluntary, natural and robust command signals needed for advanced prosthetic limbs.