Search

This paper discusses some of the advances and limitations of the field of functional electrical stimulation (FES) and why the field has difficulty in achieving its promise whenever many wires are used throughout the body. We take the stand that the great time for FES will be when the stimulators and sensors are injectable and wireless and thus make it feasible to have many stimulation/sensing locations in the body. It has taken a long time to get there, but we are getting close to having a coordinated wireless system. The only commercially successful FES devices that exist today are the cardiac pacemakers, the spinal cord stimulators, and, to a lesser extent, the cochlear implants, none of which have more than one or two cables placed in the body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the development of a high-density electronic interface to the central nervous system. Silicon micromachined electrode arrays now permit the long-term monitoring of neural activity in vivo as well as the insertion of electronic signals into neural networks at the cellular level. Efforts to understand and engineer the biology of the implant/tissue interface are also underway. These electrode arrays are facilitating significant advances in our understanding of the nervous system, and merged with on-chip circuitry, signal processing, microfluidics, and wireless interfaces, they are forming the basis for a family of neural prostheses for the possible treatment of disorders such as blindness, deafness, paralysis, severe epilepsy, and Parkinson's disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]