FPGABased Tactile Sensory Feedback System with Optical Fiber Data Communication Link for Prosthetic Applications Tactile sensory feedback systems could enable the prosthetic system to convey touch information to the amputee. Employing sensor arrays with a high number of sensors gives highresolution tactile information but imposes challenges on the embedded electronics in processing and transmitting a large number of tactile data to the prosthetic user. This work proposes the design of a FPGAbased approach for tactile sensory feedback systems that employs an optical fiber data communication link for prosthetic applications. The system consists of an interface electronics to manage the data acquisition from the tactile sensor array, a digital coding unit, an optical fiberbased communication link, a digital decoding unit and a further interface electronics to communicate with external apparatus. The data acquisition process followed by a UWBbased optical modulation allows for the transmission of pulsed coded tactile data through the optical fiber to a final user by means of, for example, an electrotactile stimulator combined with flexible electrodes. The transmitter and receiver systems have been implemented on two different FPGA boards with the optical communication channel connecting the two boards. The designed system functionality was demonstrated by employing an experimental setup where sequence of sensor data, emulating an array of 32 sensors sampled at 2kHz, were employed to verify the correctness of the data transmission at 100Mbps data rate through the optical fiber. Experimental results validated the functionality of the proposed design and demonstrated that the optical communication link highly improves the robustness to electromagnetic disturbances, the transmission data rate as well as the power consumption.

Integration of a Virtual Protheses with a Multichannel Tactile Feedback Interface Tactile feedback is a prime element for improving the amputee ability to interact with different objects. Providing effective sensory feedback to the prostheses is still an unresolved issue. Different approaches had been used to enable bidirectional communication between the prosthesis and the user; however, none could fully replicate the human hand natural sensation. In this regards, we used a 3D virtual hand simulator to communicate the tactile information resulting from hand manipulation. A MATLAB based graphical interface has been developed to control the virtual prosthesis and map tactile sensory data to a multichannel electrotactile stimulation system. Moreover, we presented a spatially coded hand map in accordance with the custom designed electrode array.