Microestimuladors implantables alimentats per bateries

The electrical stimulation is a field with a lot of medical applications. Nowadays, there are some clinical applications, but it is expected in the near future that relevant technological new applications will help in rehabilitation therapies. On the other hand, it is expected that the Biomedical field will be a natural expansion field for microsystms in next years. The objective of this project is the developement of microsystems for the electrical stimulation of nervous and/or muscles, which would be quirurgically implanted in order to improve their clinical performance. The microsystem eill be designed versatile just to broad the application range, will be composed by several integrated circuits (telemetric unit for the wireless transmission of orders and information, a microprocessor to program the waveforms for stimulation and a specific circuit to perform the stimulation and supply the signal to the electrodes), will be encapsulated in Titanium along with other electrical components (coils/antena, battery,...), and with a system of passing conectors that will allow the substitution of the microsystem leaving the electrodes inside. The most difficult partr is the encapsulation of the circuit, as it is the case for all the microsystems; in this case, due to the fact that there are anly integrated circuits and there are no sensors or actuators the difficulty is slightly lower, but due to the future medical use the difficulty is increased. As a demostrator for the potentiality of the developed microsystems, a microstimulator will be built and medically validated for the stimulation of the "sacred roots". This microstimulator will be implanted in two medular injured patients for the control of miction, defecation and erection.