Retinal dystrophies and age-related macular degeneration related to photoreceptor degeneration can cause blindness. In blind patients, although the electrical activation of the residual retinal circuit can provide useful artificial visual perception, the resolutions of current retinal prostheses have been limited either by large electrodes or small numbers of pixels. Here, we report the evaluation, in three awake non-human primates, of a previously reported near-infrared-light-sensitive photovoltaic subretinal prosthesis. We show that multi-pixel stimulation of the prosthesis within radiation-safety limits enabled eye tracking in the animals, that they responded to the stimulations in the direction of the implant with repeated saccades, and that the implant-induced responses were present two years after device implantation. Our findings pave the way for the clinical evaluation of a 378-electrode prosthesis in patients affected by dry atrophic age-related macular degeneration.
This paper presents an energy harvesting technique to power autonomous systems and more particularly active implantable medical devices. We employ a piezoelectric diaphragm placed in a fluidic environment such as blood subjected to very low frequency (2 Hz) pressure variations that is deflected in a quasi-static manner and transduces mechanical energy into electrical energy. In order to maximize energy generation and to get the most out of a given piezoelectric device, we propose to apply an optimized method to extract the piezoelectrically generated charge through the application of a controlled voltage. We believe that this method could be one of the improvement levers to achieve self-powered miniaturized implants. An analytical model is presented and shows that within its validity domain, the extracted energy is proportional to the desired applied voltage. Taking power electronics losses into account can yield a theoretical increase in the extracted energy of several thousand per cent. Experimental measurements in a pressure chamber have been carried out whose results corroborate the proposed model. For the tested setup, the application of a 10 V peak amplitude square-wave voltage increased the extracted energy by a factor of nine compared to a classical rectifier-based energy harvesting method.
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