• prosthetics
• upper limb amputees
• movement illusion
• muscle vibration
• proprioception
• sensory feedback

Feedback restoration is pivotal to improve myoelectric prostheses’ usability. In particular, proprioceptive feedback would ease prosthesis control. Thus, a stimulation system for muscle vibration was developed to investigate the feasibility of providing homologous and somatotopic proprioceptive feedback non-invasively. From the device characterization, it emerged how the developed system was theoretically suited for prosthetics applications. Further testing protocols were designed to understand the actual capabilities of the device in eliciting illusory movement sensations and to investigate the possibility of controlling the illusion created. The results obtained suggested that the developed vibratory stimulation system could be exploited to provide proprioceptive sensory feedback in a closed-loop configuration. To this aim, two actuators were used to endow a robotic hand with a vibratory stimulation system for proprioception restoration. Integration was achieved through extensive software development to ensure correct stimulation patterns while preserving accurate movement intention decoding. The possibility of providing useful information about robotic hand movement was proved. Moreover, amputee’s smooth control of the prosthetic hand despite vibration disturbances was achieved. Eventually, the vibratory stimulation system was proved to guarantee functional feedback, providing sufficient information to discriminate between objects of different sizes.