Design of a pulse-triggered four-channel functional electrical stimulator using complementary current source and time division multiplexing output method

• Published in: 2015 37th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC) Vol. 2015; pp. 1671 - 1674
• Main Authors: Wang, Hai-Peng, Wang, Zhi-Gong, Lü, Xiao-Ying, Huang, Zong-Hao, Zhou, Yu-Xuan
• Format: Conference Proceeding Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 01-08-2015
• Subjects: Electric Impedance; Electric Power Supplies; Electric Stimulation Therapy - instrumentation; Electrodes; Hemiplegia - therapy; Humans; Impedance; Microcomputers; Mirrors; Resistors; Software; Switches; Time division multiplexing; Transistors
• ISSN: 1094-687X; 1557-170X; 1558-4615
• DOI: 10.1109/EMBC.2015.7318697

In this paper, a four-channel pulse-triggered functional electrical stimulator using complementary current source and time division output method is proposed for the research and application of functional electrical stimulation (FES). The high-voltage compliance and output impedance is increased by adopting the complementary current source, which can also realize the linear voltage-to-current conversion and high channel isolation. A high-voltage analog switch chip MAX14803, combined with a FIFO queue algorithm in the microprocessor, is used to setup the H-bridge and multiplexers for the four-channel time division multiplexing output. With this method, the size and cost of the key components are reduced greatly. The stimulating core circuit area is 30×50 mm 2 . According to the experiments, the stimulator can achieve the four-channel charge-balanced biphasic stimulation with a current range between 0 and 60 mA and a single-phase pulse amplitude up to 60 V.