Comment in The Lancet Neurology with Thomas Stieglitz

The journal *The Lancet Neurology* has published a commentary titled “The restoration of perception remains one of the central challenges of neurotechnology.” The article provides a clinically grounded roadmap for delivering tactile, proprioceptive, and thermal feedback via multimodal prosthetic interfaces and was co-authored by Prof. Thomas Stieglitz, a professor at IMTEK and a member of BrainLinks-BrainTools.

Restoring sensory feedback is presented as essential because prostheses that convey homologous touch, position and temperature signals improve motor control, lessen phantom‑limb pain and raise device acceptance, directly tackling the chronic problem of abandonment. The authors review both invasive (peripheral, spinal and cortical) and non‑invasive strategies, outlining a translational pathway that mimics physiological signalling with multimodal, biomimetic loops. They also note the current barriers: complex surgical procedures, limited long‑term data, the absence of standardized real‑world performance metrics, hardware constraints and a market that is presently too small to guarantee lifelong patient support. Looking forward, the View proposes hybrid therapeutic frameworks that combine adaptive closed‑loop neuromodulation—such as vagus‑nerve stimulation—with emerging high‑precision non‑invasive techniques like temporal‑interference and quantum sensing. Such combinations could move prostheses from purely assistive devices toward tools that actively drive neural plasticity and functional recovery.

Link to the original article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1474442226000918?via%3Dihub