Path 2: Postdoctoral Associate – IC Design for Self-powered Stimulation Implants

Faculty Name and Title: Sohmyung Ha, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Bioengineering

Research Project Description

This project aims at developing a n implantable self-powered cardiac stimulation s ystem, which features energy harvesting from the motion of heart, power management, wireless communication, and recording of cardiac activities. The proposed system util izes a stretchable transducer that converts the movement to electricity, which is rectified and converted to DC power by the IC. This power is managed and provided to other system components. One of them is an electrical stimulator that provides electric charges to the tissue, i.e. heart tissue in this specific case. All the stimulation parameters, including current amplitude, polarity, time, and frequency, are programmable via wireless communication. In order to ensure the safe operation of the implant, the system includes multiple recording channels of electrical signals and electrochemica...