Electrocutaneous stimulation can restore the missing sensory information to prosthetic users. In electrotactile feedback, the information about the prosthesis state is transmitted in the form of pulse trains. The stimulation frequency is an important parameter since it influences the data transmission rate over the feedback channel as well as the form of the elicited tactile sensations.

We evaluated the influence of the stimulation frequency on the subject’s ability to utilize the feedback information during electrotactile closed-loop control. Ten healthy subjects performed a real-time compensatory tracking (standard test bench) of sinusoids and pseudorandom signals using either visual feedback (benchmark) or electrocutaneous feedback in seven conditions characterized by different combinations of the stimulation frequency (F_STIM) and tracking error sampling rate (F_TE). The tracking error was transmitted using two concentric electrodes placed on the forearm. The quality of tracking was assessed using the Squared Pearson Correlation Coefficient (SPCC), the Normalized Root Mean Square Tracking Error (NRMSTE) and the time delay between the reference and generated trajectories (TD_IO).

The results demonstrated that F_STIM was more important for the control performance than F_TE. The quality of tracking deteriorated with a decrease in the stimulation frequency, SPCC and NRMSTE (mean) were 87.5% and 9.4% in the condition 100/100 (F_TE/F_STIM), respectively, and deteriorated to 61.1% and 15.3% in 5/5, respectively, while the TD_IO increased from 359.8 ms in 100/100 to 1009 ms in 5/5. However, the performance recovered when the tracking error sampled at a low rate was delivered using a high stimulation frequency (SPCC = 83.6%, NRMSTE = 10.3%, TD_IO = 415.6 ms, in 5/100).

The likely reason for the performance decrease and recovery was that the stimulation frequency critically influenced the tactile perception quality and thereby the effective rate of information transfer through the feedback channel. The outcome of this study can facilitate the selection of optimal system parameters for somatosensory feedback in upper limb prostheses. The results imply that the feedback variables (e.g., grasping force) should be transmitted at relatively high frequencies of stimulation (>25 Hz), but that they can be sampled at much lower rates (e.g., 5 Hz).

The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12984-015-0022-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.