An Implantable Network of Stimulation Units
Résumé
Functional electrical stimulation (FES) is a palliative solution to improve the daily life living of spinal cord injured patients; it has been successfully used in numerous applications such as pacemakers, deep brain stimulation, pain control or hearing restoration. Implanted electrical stimulation is also studied for movement rehabilitation like ambulation and prehension. When not limited to one site of stimulation solutions for implanted FES are actually mainly based on centralized architectures. They lead to complex surgery, high risk of failure during and after surgery, and are not really adequate to face selectivity issues that require multi-polar electrodes. We thus designed and developed a new architecture for implanted FES system based on a deterministic 2-wire network of distributed stimulation and measurement units. Such a distributed FES architecture favors new possibilities such as evolving architecture, complex multipolar multi-phasic stimulations, and network-based control of muscles. The paper presents this original implantable FES architecture.