Proprioception is comprised of sensory input from several sources includingmuscle spindles, joint capsule, ligaments and skin. The purpose of the presentexperiment was to investigate whether the central nervous system was able tointegrate an artificial biofeedback delivered through electrotactilestimulation of the tongue to improve proprioceptive acuity at the ankle joint.To address this objective, nine young healthy adults were asked to perform anactive ankle-matching task with and without biofeedback. The underlyingprinciple of the biofeedback consisted of supplying subjects with supplementaryinformation about the position of their matching ankle position relative totheir reference ankle position through a tongue-placed tactile output device(Tongue Display Unit). Measures of the overall accuracy and the variability ofthe positioning were determined using the absolute error and the variableerror, respectively. Results showed more accurate and more consistent matchingperformances with than without biofeedback, as indicated by decreased absoluteand variables errors, respectively. These findings suggested that the centralnervous system was able to take advantage of an artificial tongue-placedtactile biofeedback to improve the position sense at the ankle joint.
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