Design criteria of a transcutaneous power delivery system for implantable devices.

Implantable cardiac assist devices such as artificial hearts and blood pumps are a rapidly growing therapy used for treating moderate to severe congestive heart failure. While current treatments offer improved heart failure survival and increased patient functionality with enhanced quality of life, powering these devices are still constraining. In practice, percutaneous cables passing through skin are used for power and control data transmission requiring patients to maintain a sterile dressing on the skin cable-exit site. This contact site limits patient movement as it is vulnerable to wound infection due to trauma and poor healing. As a result, a sterile dressing has to be maintained and nursed regularly for treating the wound. Complications from the exit site infections are a leading cause of death in long-term support with these devices. Wireless power and control transmission systems have been studied and developed over years in order to avoid percutaneous cables while supplying power efficiently to the implanted device. These power systems, commonly named Transcutaneous Energy Transfer (TET) systems, enable power transmission across the skin without direct electrical connectivity to the power source. TET systems use time-varying electromagnetic induction produced by a primary coil that is usually placed near skin outside the body. The induced voltage in an implanted secondary coil is then rectified and regulated to transfer energy to an implanted rechargeable battery in order to power the biomedical load device. Efficient and optimum energy transfer using such transcutaneous methods is more complex for mobile patients due to coupling discrepancies caused by variations in the alignment of the coil. The research studies equivalent maximum power transfer topologies for evaluating voltage gain and coupling link efficiency of TET system. Also, this research adds to previous efforts by generalizing different scenarios of misalignments of different coil size that affects the coupling link. As a whole, this study of geometric coil misalignments reconsiders potential anatomic location for coil placement to optimize TET systems performance in anticipated environment for efficient and safe operation.--Abstract

Power Amplifiers for Electronic Bio-Implants

Healthcare systems face continual challenges in meeting their aims to provide quality care to their citizens within tight budgets. Ageing populations in the developed world are perhaps one of the greatest concerns in providing quality healthcare in the future. The median age of citizens in economically developed regions is set to approach 40 years by the year 2050, and reach as high as 55 years in Japan. This trend is likely to lead to strained economies caused by less revenue raised by smaller workforces. Another effect of ageing populations is the need of further care in order to remain healthy. This care varies from frequent check-ups to condition monitoring, compensation for organ malfunction and serious surgical operations. As a result of these trends, healthcare systems will face the task of servicing more people with more serious and expensive health services, all using less available funds. Effort is being focused on running cheaper and more effective healthcare systems and the development of technology to assist in this process is a natural research priority

A Three – tier bio-implantable sensor monitoring and communications platform

One major hindrance to the advent of novel bio-implantable sensor technologies is the need for a reliable power source and data communications platform capable of continuously, remotely, and wirelessly monitoring deeply implantable biomedical devices. This research proposes the feasibility and potential of combining well established, ‘human-friendly' inductive and ultrasonic technologies to produce a proof-of-concept, generic, multi-tier power transfer and data communication platform suitable for low-power, periodically-activated implantable analogue bio-sensors. In the inductive sub-system presented, 5 W of power is transferred across a 10 mm gap between a single pair of 39 mm (primary) and 33 mm (secondary) circular printed spiral coils (PSCs). These are printed using an 8000 dpi resolution photoplotter and fabricated on PCB by wet-etching, to the maximum permissible density. Our ultrasonic sub-system, consisting of a single pair of Pz21 (transmitter) and Pz26 (receiver) piezoelectric PZT ceramic discs driven by low-frequency, radial/planar excitation (-31 mode), without acoustic matching layers, is also reported here for the first time. The discs are characterised by propagation tank test and directly driven by the inductively coupled power to deliver 29 μW to a receiver (implant) employing a low voltage start-up IC positioned 70 mm deep within a homogeneous liquid phantom. No batteries are used. The deep implant is thus intermittently powered every 800 ms to charge a capacitor which enables its microcontroller, operating with a 500 kHz clock, to transmit a single nibble (4 bits) of digitized sensed data over a period of ~18 ms from deep within the phantom, to the outside world. A power transfer efficiency of 83% using our prototype CMOS logic-gate IC driver is reported for the inductively coupled part of the system. Overall prototype system power consumption is 2.3 W with a total power transfer efficiency of 1% achieved across the tiers

Power Approaches for Implantable Medical Devices.

Implantable medical devices have been implemented to provide treatment and to assess in vivo physiological information in humans as well as animal models for medical diagnosis and prognosis, therapeutic applications and biological science studies. The advances of micro/nanotechnology dovetailed with novel biomaterials have further enhanced biocompatibility, sensitivity, longevity and reliability in newly-emerged low-cost and compact devices. Close-loop systems with both sensing and treatment functions have also been developed to provide point-of-care and personalized medicine. Nevertheless, one of the remaining challenges is whether power can be supplied sufficiently and continuously for the operation of the entire system. This issue is becoming more and more critical to the increasing need of power for wireless communication in implanted devices towards the future healthcare infrastructure, namely mobile health (m-Health). In this review paper, methodologies to transfer and harvest energy in implantable medical devices are introduced and discussed to highlight the uses and significances of various potential power sources

Low-Power Circuits for Brain–Machine Interfaces

This paper presents work on ultra-low-power circuits for brain–machine interfaces with applications for paralysis prosthetics, stroke, Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, prosthetics for the blind, and experimental neuroscience systems. The circuits include a micropower neural amplifier with adaptive power biasing for use in multi-electrode arrays; an analog linear decoding and learning architecture for data compression; low-power radio-frequency (RF) impedance-modulation circuits for data telemetry that minimize power consumption of implanted systems in the body; a wireless link for efficient power transfer; mixed-signal system integration for efficiency, robustness, and programmability; and circuits for wireless stimulation of neurons with power-conserving sleep modes and awake modes. Experimental results from chips that have stimulated and recorded from neurons in the zebra finch brain and results from RF power-link, RF data-link, electrode- recording and electrode-stimulating systems are presented. Simulations of analog learning circuits that have successfully decoded prerecorded neural signals from a monkey brain are also presented

Systems design of a high resolution retinal prosthesis

Simulations of artificial vision suggest that 1000 electrodes may be required to restore vision to individuals with diseases of the outer retina. In order to achieve such an implant, new technology is needed, since the state-of-the-art implantable neural stimulator has at most 22 contacts with neural tissue. Considerable progress has been made towards that goal with the development of image processing, microelectronics, and polymer based MEMS. An image processing system has been realized that is capable of real-time implementation of image decimation and filtering (for example, edge detection). Application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) have been designed and tested to demonstrate closed loop power control and efficient microstimulation. A novel packaging process has been developed that is capable of simultaneously forming communication coils, interconnects, and stimulating electrodes

An Integrated Passive Phase-Shift Keying Modulator for Biomedical Implants With Power Telemetry Over a Single Inductive Link

This paper presents a passive phase-shift keying (PPSK) modulator for uplink data transmission for biomedical implants with simultaneous power and data transmission over a single 13.56 MHz inductive link. The PPSK modulator provides a data rate up to 1.35 Mbps with a modulation index between 3% and 38% for a variation of the coupling coefficient between 0.05 and 0.26. This modulation scheme is particularly suited for biomedical implants that have high power demand and low coupling coefficients. The PPSK modulator operates in conjunction with on-off-keying downlink communication. The same inductive link is used to provide up to 100 mW of power to a multi-channel stimulator. The majority of the system on the implant side was implemented as an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC), fabricated in 0.6-[Formula: see text] high voltage CMOS technology. The theory of PPSK modulation, simulated and measured performance evaluation, and comparison with other state-of-the-art impedance modulation techniques is presented. The measured bit error rate around critical coupling at 1.35 Mbps is below 6 ×10(-8)