A new approach to design safe and reliable electrical stimulator

In this paper, a new active charge-balancing technique for functional electrical stimulation is presented. In this method, electrode voltage is monitored after each stimulation period and a charge-balancing circuit keeps the electrode voltage in the safe range. Also, a dynamic comparator is utilised to reduce the total power consumption. This method is adopted in a microstimulator which is used in a functional electrical stimulation application. Simulation in a high-voltage 0.18 μm CMOS technology validates the feasibility of the approach and its low power consumption. The power consumption of the charge-balancing circuits contributes 3.4% of the overall power consumption of the system.