Single transmitter programmes and powers implants

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A single transmitter located outside the human body can provide programming and power to heart and spinal cord implants, claim engineers in the US.

Experiments at Rice University's Brown School of Engineering in Houston, Texas showed an alternating magnetic field generated and controlled by a battery-powered transmitter outside the body can deliver power and programming to two or more implants to at least 60mm away.

Neural implant programmed and charged remotely

A peer-reviewed paper about the advance by electrical and computer engineer Kaiyuan Yang and his colleagues at Rice University's Brown School of Engineering won the best paper award at the IEEE's Custom Integrated Circuits Conference, held virtually in April, 2021.

According to Rice, the implants can be programmed with delays measured in microseconds, enabling them to coordinate the triggering of multiple wireless pacemakers in separate chambers of a patient's heart.

"We show it's possible to program the implants to stimulate in a coordinated pattern," Yang said in a statement. "We synchronise every device, like a symphony. That gives us a lot of degrees of freedom for stimulation treatments, whether it's for cardiac pacing or for a spinal cord."

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