University of Pittsburgh

A participant with severe upper-limb paralysis caused by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) wore an endovascular stent-electrode array and a scalp EEG cap at the same time, in the same session, while attempting ankle flexion and extension. Both recordings changed markedly during attempted movement, but the stent array showed stronger per-channel motor modulation and was unaffected by skull attenuation. Scalp EEG was more susceptible to eye blinks and jaw-muscle activity, while the stent array picked up prominent cardiac signals. Neither method reliably distinguished left from right ankle movement, leaving spatial localization an open problem.

A University of Pittsburgh team (Bose et al.) tested the crossmodal congruency effect (CCE) task in 15 able-bodied volunteers to see whether it can quantify how intuitive lower-limb sensory feedback feels. At the knee, the task distinguished more natural pneumatic stimulation from less natural electrical stimulation; at the foot, it could not tell the same stimuli apart. The study was posted to bioRxiv on August 10, 2026. Lower-limb amputees often have balance and gait problems because their prostheses give no somatosensory feedback; electrical-stimulation neuroprostheses can partly restore sensation, but there has been no way to quantify how intuitive that sensation is. The authors stress that external factors affecting the CCE must be identified before it can be used with amputees.

US researchers using intracortical microelectrode arrays identified distinct neural patterns in the motor and somatosensory cortex of patients with spinal cord injury that separately encode the timing and force of grasping, offering new ideas for developing more precise brain-computer interface (BCI) systems.