Optical wireless cochlear implants

Abstract

In the present contribution, we introduce a wireless optical communication-based system architecture which is shown to significantly improve the reliability and the spectral and power efficiency of the transcutaneous link in cochlear implants (CIs). We refer to the proposed system as optical wireless cochlear implant (OWCI). In order to provide a quantified understanding of its design parameters, we establish a theoretical framework that takes into account the channel particularities, the integration area of the internal unit, the transceivers misalignment, and the characteristics of the optical units. To this end, we derive explicit expressions for the corresponding average signal-to-noise-ratio, outage probability, ergodic spectral efficiency and capacity of the transcutaneous optical link (TOL). These expressions are subsequently used to assess the dependence of the TOL's communication quality on the transceivers design parameters and the corresponding channels characteristics. The offered analytic results are corroborated with respective results from Monte Carlo simulations. Our findings reveal that OWCI is a particularly promising architecture that drastically increases the reliability and effectiveness of the CI TOL, whilst it requires considerably lower transmit power compared to the corresponding widely-used radio frequency (RF) solution.

Hearing restoration by a low-weight power-efficient multichannel optogenetic cochlear implant system

“…The weight of the whole system corresponded to roughly one-third of the animals head weight, which is well below the provisions of the U.S. Army Aeromedical Laboratory of 50 % (see also ref. 77) and below the another study in rats reporting no adverse effects in animals carrying nearly twice as much weight 78 as we showed here. Different from clinical eCI systems consisting of an external sound processor and the actual implant with driver and electrode array, we implemented a single, external head-mounted device to which the oCI or eCI probe were interfaced at the vertex of the animal's skull.…”

Aplicações em redes de sensores na área da saúde e gerenciamento de dados médicos: tecnologias em ascensão

“…Esses estudos mostraram um consumo de energia de 17mW para uma taxa de dados de 10 Kbps, que é muito menor à máxima potência emitida para comunicações infravermelhas [Haddad e Khalighi, 2019]. Alguns estudos são apresentados em [Trevlakis et al, 2019, Parmentier et al, 2008.…”

Enabling Communication Technologies for Medical Wireless Body-Area Networks

“…Moreover, the use of OWC for transmitting accelerometer data for indoor physical activity monitoring was investigated in [37] where its efficacy was demonstrated through experimental measurements using a designed wearable system. On the other hand, in-body communication in the optical domain has attracted increasing attention in the past few years as it provides a better performance in terms of data rate and interference level, as compared to RF technologies [38]- [40]. For instance, a transdermal optical link operating at 1 Mbps through porcine skin was reported in [38] using a 860 nm LED at the transmitter and a PIN photo-diode at the receiver.…”