Design of an implant for preventing incontinence after spinal cord injury.

An implanted device is being designed and tested which has the main function of suppressing hyperreflexic bladder contractions by stimulating the pudendal afferent pathway. The concept is that the contractions will be detected by recording natural nerve signals. This is challenging because the changes in neural signal are very small (sub-microvolt), and the device must run 24 h per day, which means that for convenience it must be battery-powered. The energy budget is therefore tight. Furthermore, because the patient must be able to intervene to occasionally empty the bladder, a radio link is needed to the device. Within the EU project Healthy Aims, most aspects of the design have been made and tested. This includes the battery, battery charger, neural amplifier, and the package incorporating the Medical Implant Communication System (MICS) antenna, which are briefly described here. This article is a progress report.

Passive neutralization of myoelectric interference from neural recording tripoles.

In this paper, we present a simple passive technique for removing myoelectric interference in neural recording systems using tripolar electrodes. Imbalance is simply unavoidable with the conventional quasi-tripole (QT) amplifier and this technakshnique is based on a modified version of the QT, which sees the tripole as a bridge that can be balanced by adding impedance to one of the outer electrodes. We show that parallel resistance and capacitance is better than a series combination for use at all frequencies, and that with a tripole that was intentionally made imbalanced, by an amount that we measure as 3%, the interference can be reduced about 10-fold. It is important to null the interference at low frequencies, in the electromyography (EMG) band, to get the best improvement. Common-mode interference can also be reduced by appropriate trimming if necessary.