Bi-modal Stimulator: Simultaneous electrical and acoustical stimulation to test a hypothesis for treating tinnitus

Subjective tinnitus is a sensation of sound without an external source. There is no clear understanding of the cause and pathology of tinnitus.<br/><br/>Literature suggests a combination of deafferentation of the tonotopic map , the Bayesian brain model, and the triple mode network, creating one combined hypothesis for tinnitus pathology. Based...

Delta-Sigma Control Loop For Energy-Efficient Electrical Stimulation with Arbitrary-Shape Stimuli

This paper presents a novel multi-channel stimulation backend with a multi-bit delta-sigma control loop, which enables precise adjustment of the stimulation current through modulation of the supply voltage. This minimizes the overhead voltage of series circuitry to the stimulation load and avoids the associated energy loss. Additionally, to...

Multichannel current-mode stimulator with channel-specific regulated power supply

Developing neuroprosthetic bioelectronic devices requires wirelessly-powered implantable stimulator systems with hundreds to thousands of output channels. Power efficiency optimization is crucial for scaling up the number of output channels. Current-mode electrical stimulation is favored for safety but is power-inefficient in conventional...

Kilohertz alternating current neuromodulation of the pudendal nerves: effects on the anal canal and anal sphincter in rats

The first two objectives were to establish which stimulation parameters of kilohertz frequency alternating current (KHFAC) neuromodulation influence the effectiveness of pudendal nerve block and its safety. The third aim was to determine whether KHFAC neuromodulation of the pudendal nerve can relax the pelvic musculature, including the anal...

Pre-Filtering of Stimuli for Improved Energy Efficiency in Electrical Neural Stimulation

This work proposes a guideline for designing more energy-efficient electrical stimulators by analyzing the frequency spectrum of the stimuli. It is shown that the natural low-pass characteristic of the neuron’s membrane limits the energy transfer efficiency from the stimulator to the cell. Thus, to improve the transfer efficiency, it is proposed...

A Charge Controlled Switched-Voltage Mode Neurostimulator: For effective, safe and efficient multi-channel intracortical visual stimulation

Development of a visual prosthesis has the potential to help millions of patients with visual impairment around the world. One approach of visual prostheses is intracortical stimulation, where electrodes penetrating the visual cortex are used to create small light dots in the patients visual field. Said therapy requires an implantable...

Design of a novel multi-modal stimulation device for the treatment of tinnitus

Approximately 15-20% of theworld population is aected by tinnitus, a hearing condition associated with phantomsound perception. A large number of suerers experience a severe level of tinnitus and they are not ableto conduct a normal life because they develop insomnia, depression, and distress.Extensive research has been made to study its...

Design and Fabrication of Electrical Stimulation Set Up for EHT platform

The overarching goal of Engineered Heart Tissues (EHTs) is to develop functional 3D heart tissues in vitro with the potential to find drug targets, identify drug toxicity and predict the effects of the drugs in the body. This 3D model of the cardiac tissue consists of a bunch of cells, self-assembled around specific anchoring points the main aim...

Ultrasonic Power Transfer for Ultra-High-Frequency Biphasic Electrical Neural Stimulation

Neurostimulators have been developed over the past few decades to treat various diseases, such as Parkinson’s disease, chronic pain, epilepsy, migraine and bladder dysfunction. One of the major design challenges is the selection of a powering method that could supply mW power levels to miniaturized implanted devices. Among several methods,...

An Ultrasonically Powered and Controlled Ultra-High-Frequency Biphasic Electrical Neurostimulator

This paper presents the design of a neurostimulator performing biphasic ultra-high-frequency electrical stimulation while being driven from ultrasound energy. Unlike conventional constant current or constant voltage stimulators or state-of-the-art ultra-high-frequency stimulators, the system does not convert the input AC signal into regulated...

An Implantable Spinal Cord Stimulator with Adaptive Voltage Compliance for Freely Moving Rats

When the neural pathway within the spinal cord gets damaged, a person’s ability to initiate loco- motion can be affected. Currently, no restorative treatments exist for individuals that suffer from such an injury. However, recent studies have shown epidural spinal cord stimulation (ESCS) to be a potential option for re-establishing some...

Electrical vestibular stimulation for human standing balance and motion perception: Effects of stimulation arrangement and signal design

Vestibular information from both sides of the head converges within the vestibular nuclei to contribute to postural stabilization of the head and body, and to provide accurate perceptions of self-motion. It remains uncertain whether these responses are evoked through equivalent integration processes, because our perception of head position is...

Does a coupling capacitor enhance the charge balance during neural stimulation? An empirical study

Due to their DC-blocking characteristic, coupling capacitors are widely used to prevent potentially harmful charge buildup at the electrode–tissue interface. Although the capacitors can be an effective safety measure, it often seems overlooked that coupling capacitors actually introduce an offset voltage over the electrode–tissue interface as...

The Spike app: A programable neuron to stimulate brain slices in electrophysiology

Methods to stimulate living neurons in electrophysiological experiments involve the use of nerve stimulators that output deterministic patterns fixed at a certain frequency. Thus, they are unable to generate realistic sequences of action potentials to stimulate living neurons. By emulating firing patterns of excitable cells we are able to give...

A steering electrode array for selective stimulation of sacral nerve roots

In this work a cylindrical electrode array to be used for electrical stimulation of sacral nerve roots is studied in respect to its ability to achieve selective stimulation of various spatial regions of the nerve bundle. Simulation results achieved on a simplified model consisting of 6 electrodes evenly distributed along the sacral root...

Design and fabrication of stiff silicon probes: A step towards sophisticated cochlear implant electrodes

Cochlear implants work on the principle of direct electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve. It has advantages to replace their traditional wired electrodes by a high-density thin-film multielectrode stimulation array which is relatively small in dimensions, stable, resistant to electrolysis, and offers batch fabrication capabilities with...