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Electrical stimulation of peripheral nerves is a cornerstone of bioelectronic medicine. Effective ways to accomplish peripheral nerve stimulation (PNS) noninvasively without surgically implanted devices are enabling for fundamental research and clinical translation. Here, it is demonstrated how relatively high-frequency sine-wave carriers (3 kHz) emitted by two pairs of cutaneous electrodes can temporally interfere at deep peripheral nerve targets. The effective stimulation frequency is equal to the offset frequency (0.5 - 4 Hz) between the two carriers. This principle of temporal interference nerve stimulation (TINS) in vivo using the murine sciatic nerve model is validated. Effective actuation is delivered at significantly lower current amplitudes than standard transcutaneous electrical stimulation. Further, how flexible and conformable on-skin multielectrode arrays can facilitate precise alignment of TINS onto a nerve is demonstrated. This method is simple, relying on the repurposing of existing clinically-approved hardware. TINS opens the possibility of precise noninvasive stimulation with depth and efficiency previously impossible with transcutaneous techniques., Funding Agencies|European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union [716867, 949191]; City Council of Brno, Czech Republic; European Research Council [834677]; Swedish Research Council; MedTechLabs

© 2021, The Author(s). Aberrant neural oscillations hallmark numerous brain disorders. Here, we first report a method to track the phase of neural oscillations in real-time via endpoint-corrected Hilbert transform (ecHT) that mitigates the characteristic Gibbs distortion. We then used ecHT to show that the aberrant neural oscillation that hallmarks essential tremor (ET) syndrome, the most common adult movement disorder, can be transiently suppressed via transcranial electrical stimulation of the cerebellum phase-locked to the tremor. The tremor suppression is sustained shortly after the end of the stimulation and can be phenomenologically predicted. Finally, we use feature-based statistical-learning and neurophysiological-modelling to show that the suppression of ET is mechanistically attributed to a disruption of the temporal coherence of the aberrant oscillations in the olivocerebellar loop, thus establishing its causal role. The suppression of aberrant neural oscillation via phase-locked driven disruption of temporal coherence may in the future represent a powerful neuromodulatory strategy to treat brain disorders.

We report a noninvasive strategy for electrically stimulating neurons at depth. By delivering to the brain multiple electric fields at frequencies too high to recruit neural firing, but which differ by a frequency within the dynamic range of neural firing, we can electrically stimulate neurons throughout a region where interference between the multiple fields results in a prominent electric field envelope modulated at the difference frequency. We validated this temporal interference (TI) concept via modeling and physics experiments, and verified that neurons in the living mouse brain could follow the electric field envelope. We demonstrate the utility of TI stimulation by stimulating neurons in the hippocampus of living mice without recruiting neurons of the overlying cortex. Finally, we show that by altering the currents delivered to a set of immobile electrodes, we can steerably evoke different motor patterns in living mice., National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Award 1DP1NS087724), National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Award 1R01MH103910-01), National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Award CBET 1053233), National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant 1RF1AG047661), National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant NS051874)